Educational Cancer, Privatization and Common Core

Placebos (tax credits, vouchers, Common Core) won't cure educational cancer.

St. Louis is abuzz with the recent decision from the Missouri Supreme Court regarding educational delivery to students in unaccredited districts.  From stlbeacon.org and Missouri guidelines for student transfers discusses the possibility of limiting numbers:

 Ruling last week in the long-running lawsuit now known as the Breitenfeld case, the court overturned a ruling by a St. Louis County circuit judge and said a law allowing students in unaccredited districts to transfer is constitutional. It rejected arguments that the law violates the Hancock amendment to the state constitution as well as contentions from accredited districts that they could not handle the expected influx of students.

Citizens from the receiving districts are concerned about financial reimbursement, class sizes and asking what authority school boards possess as even establishing residency requirements for district attendance is superseded by the state legislature.  Is this a viable option for failing schools?  Or are tax credits and vouchers the answer?

Some education reformers who support tax credits and vouchers  label themselves as conservative.  But are these reforms actually conservative and is privatization the answer?  How do conservatives support tax credits and vouchers when they will be subject to Common Core mandates that create national standards?

The privatization/tax credit question was considered by Van Harvey who writes at Blogodidact.com.  The following is reprinted with permission by Van (look for it in the future at his blog).  It's a thoughtful discussion on what ails education today, the current reform measures (common core, charter/vouchers/tax credits) and begs the question if  teaching what is "good and right and true" is the basis of education delivery or if it is the desire for standardization and preparation for the workforce.

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Privatizing Education cannot be our final goal, not if your goal is an America which understands what America means.

Yes, vouchers are better than taxation alone, and tax credits better than vouchers, and local control is better than state control... as stage 3 cancer is better than stage 4, stage 2 is better than stage 3, etc, but as long as what you are aiming at is cancer rather than health... you truly have no recovery in sight.

Yes it is important to reduce the cancer, but don't imagine that that is the same as eradicating it. Privatizing Education, while continuing to accept the same ideas of what an education is, if anything, will result in a more efficient and thorough spread of that cancer which is eating us alive today.

I'll try to be brief... but it is a strain to (as this series of posts will attest)... if you think I can rattle on about the constitution, that's nothing to the forests of HTML I can mow down in discussing Education - after all, the current state of our constitution followed from the 'progress' of our systematization of our method of education.

Nearly universally accepted, Left & Right, is the idea that what our schools are for is to provide our kids with the skills they need to earn a living "and to compete with the Chinese!", and that lesson is the single greatest and most revolutionary success the ProRegressives have achieved, and it has delivered us to the world we have today. That understanding of what the purpose of an education is, is what led to Standardized Testing in the first place, along with the system of school districts, under school boards, under superintendents, embedded within bureaucracies producing textbooks which further them, which we have today. 

One of my 'favorite' horror quotes is by one of the driving forces behind all of that, as well as the textbooks they are taught from, he's even more significant to our world today than even Dewey, a fellow named Ellwood P. Cubberly , and back in 1909, he enthused that:

http://archive.org/details/cu31924032695763

“Each year the child is coming to belong more to the State and less and less to the parent.”

He knew what he was talking about; when the purpose of getting an education is to acquire useful skills, for the greater good, the inevitable result will be a state which the people belong to, and are shaped by.

The meaning of "Get an Education so you can earn a good living!" is not saying "Get an Education so you can live a life worth living!", but simply get the skills needed to earn a good living, and education is done when they've got those skills that give them more of what they want - and more of what they want is all they want,  and 'forget about all that "high falutin'" stuff'.

This view wasn't new in 1909, or 1864, it was the reason why Sam Adams had to struggle for twenty years to get to the point of being able to become the father of the American Revolution, because he first had to wake up the populace that was being overcome by just that sense, that gathering skills and wealth was more important and pleasurable than liberty and virtue. The same sense which our 'Progressive' leaders, of the Left and Right, have for more than a century been proposing as being 'pro Education!', highlighting the fact that 'progressives' are Pro-Regress, and that conception of an 'education' is fundamentally anti-American.

If "American" can be said to have a meaning, it is at least in part the expectation of being secure in your property and able to live your own life, to seek 'life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness', without fearing the actions of your neighbor, no matter how strange, because they too respect the laws which make that possible.

That view, that understanding, is not the result of acquiring skills to earn a living, but from understanding what makes life worth living, and then acquiring the skills which further it. 

The Education our Founders era received (if you can find this book, buy it), was one whose purpose was to introduce students to, and help them reason their way through (teach), the most valuable materials a person needed to know in order to become a virtuous, self-governing person, capable of living in liberty with their fellows in society. Those materials consisted in a small selection of the very best that had been written in literature (secular and religious), history, art & science.

It was understood that a person who possessed that basis for an ever continuing Education, could easily master any skills necessary to live a life worth living, and that life was made even more worth living the more deeply you pursued your education, and a person so educated could achieve a worthwhile life and dazzling successes, because they first understood what was of worthwhile to a good life - the likes of Jefferson & Madison did not spring from nowhere, they can from that idea.

The achievement and culmination of Western Civilization, was the understanding that when what is Good and Right and True is what drives you, then Power is harnessed (though never mastered) and made to enrich the lives of all, and the result of that was America.

The ProRegressive seeks to short cut that quest, best summed up in the well intentioned efforts of some of our Founders themselves, such as Dr. Benjamin Rush & Noah Webster, who, impatient and dazzled with the effects of Science, sought to more easily grasp its fruits by chopping down the height of the tree which grew it,

http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/v1ch18s26.html

"Another defect in our schools, which, since the revolution, is become inexcuseable, is the want of proper books. The collections which are now used consist of essays that respect foreign and ancient nations. The minds of youth are perpetually led to the history of Greece and Rome or to Great Britain; boys are constantly repeating the declamations of Demosthenes and Cicero, or debates upon some political question in the British Parliment. These are excellent specimens of good sense, polished stile and perfect oratory; but they are not interesting to children."

What Webster proposed was that what produced his own education, be traded for "...A selection of essays...", a synopsis of facts, soon to become factoids, that sought to pluck out the fruits of the West without the need to grow the trees they grew upon, which was the basis for that dazzlingly interesting feature of every child's 'education' today (and Cubberly's specialty) - the Textbook.

When was the last time you saw a child willingly lugging one of these grey condensations of pap to the beach to read?

What 'education' can follow from what no one, not even the teachers, have an interest in reading?

Put it this way, John Adams spoke of that moment when James Otis rose "like a flame of fire!" and thundered against the Writs of Assistance,

http://blogodidact.blogspot.com/p/early-american-documents.html#James Otis

 "Then and there the child Independence was born", and it was born through what Adams described as Otis's

 "promptitude of classical allusions, a depth of research, a rapid summary of historical events and dates, a profusion of legal authorities, a prophetic glance of his eye into futurity, and a torrent of impetuous eloquence, he hurried away every thing before him"

That child was only able to be born, let alone conceived, because those classical allusions and dates were not simply recognized by those in attendance as trivia to be pursued, but matters which they understood and understood to be vital to the lives of each and every one there, and to their children as well.

Without that understanding, America won't even be stillborn into future generations, having been aborted in ours or possibly the next.

So yes, seeking to do what is practical now is important, and with subsidiarity in mind, the principle that political matters ought to be handled by the smallest, lowest and least centralized competent authority possible (that being, IMHO, neighborhood parents, and at that level, kept at that level, their being in government is not a problem (though always a danger)) moving towards vouchers and tax credits with as few strings attached as possible is as desirable and necessary as moving from stage 4 to stage 3 cancer. And moving from state run schools to charters and fully privatized schools will be just as useful as moving from stage 2 to stage 1 cancer.

But don't be fooled into thinking that stage 1 cancer is what we should be seeking, if you want America back, that requires at the very least, an Education that imparts the materials and lessons that were necessary for its conception and birth in the first place.

 

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If what Van writes is true, then why are "conservative" lawmakers, pundits and lobbyists embracing privatization and Common Core mandates?  These reforms (legislated by the State Legislature) are not created by the smallest, lowest and least centralized competent authority possible.  Once again, a larger and centralized authority is dictating to the local districts on how they can/should operate and the school board's power is usurped.

 

Do "conservatives" such as Jeb Bush and Mike Huckabee think they are fooling the citizens into thinking education delivered via vouchers, tax credits and charters are not under Common Core mandates?  These mandates are not individualized and state/locally driven.  They were not created by the smallest, lowest and least centralized competent authority possible.  

 

Don't be fooled into thinking privatization, tax credits and vouchers are the answer for educational ills.  The issue may not be so much where a child attends school but rather, what the child learns, how the child learns and who controls those educational developmental/directional theories.  When a system is riddled with cancer (loss of local districts structuring educational practice best for its unique community), the system needs to be radically altered vs treating it with placebos. 

Why is Diane Ravitch Ambivalent on Common Core Standards? Am I Missing Something?

Questioning if federal mandates are wise educational reforms? Why the ambivalence?

I don't understand Diane Ravitch's ambivalence on whether to support untested and underfunded common core state standards that will plunge states into millions of dollars of debt.  Am I missing the elephant in the room?

A National curriculum is illegal. The Pioneer white paper Road to a National Curriculum makes this very clear (pg 3).  Common Core standards and Race to the Top bypassed state legislators...and voters.  The standards and assessments are being crafted by private companies, not state educational departments.  The standards and assessment process is partially funded by the federal government.  

The federal government is promoting a national standards and curriculum agenda.  We should not be focusing on whether the standards are "good" or "bad" or need to be "tweaked".  We need to ask why the federal government has been given the power to drive standards and assessments through a process in which it threatened to withhold federal money from states if states did not adopt these standards.

Why should there be any discussion on the standards on their validity as standards?  The conversation should be on their constitutional validity and the stripping of state power to set educational directive and direction for citizens. 

From Ravitch's' My View of the Common Core Standards:

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I have neither endorsed nor rejected the Common Core national standards, for one simple reason: They are being rolled out in 45 states without a field trial anywhere. How can I say that I love them or like them or hate them when I don’t know how they will work when they reach the nation’s classrooms?

In 2009, I went to an event sponsored by the Aspen Institute where Dane Linn, one of the project directors for developing the standards, described the process. I asked if they intended to pilot test them, and I did not get a “yes” answer. The standards were released early in 2010. By happenstance, I was invited to the White House to meet with the head of the President’s Domestic Policy Council, the President’s education advisor, and Rahm Emanuel. When asked what I thought of the standards, I suggested that they should be tried out in three or four or five states first, to work out the bugs. They were not interested.

I have worked on state standards in various states. When the standards are written, no one knows how they will work until teachers take them and teach them. When you get feedback from teachers, you find out what works and what doesn’t work. You find out that some content or expectations are in the wrong grade level; some are too hard for that grade, and some are too easy. And some stuff just doesn’t work at all, and you take it out.

The Common Core will be implemented in 45 states without that kind of trial. No one knows if they will raise expectations and achievement, whether they will have no effect, whether they will depress achievement, or whether they will be so rigorous that they increase the achievement gaps.

Tom Loveless of the Brookings Institution thinks they won’t matter.

The conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute, which received large grants from the Gates Foundation to evaluate the standards and has supported them vigorously, estimates that the cost of implementing them will be between $1 billion and $8.3 billion. The conservative Pioneer Institute estimates that the cost of implementation would be about $16 billion, and suggests this figure is a “mid-range” estimate.

The Gates Foundation, lest we forget, paid to develop the standards, paid to evaluate the standards, and is underwriting Pearson’s program to create online courses and resources for the standards, which will be sold by Pearson, for a profit, to schools across the nation.

Of course, every textbook publisher now says that its products are aligned with the Common Core standards, and a bevy of consultants have come out of the woodwork to teach everyone how to teach them.

In these times of austerity, I wonder how much money districts and states have available to implement the standards faithfully. I wonder how much money they will put into professional development. I wonder about the quality of the two new assessments that the U.S. Department of Education laid out $350 million for.

These are things I wonder. But how can I possibly pass judgment until I find out how the standards work in real classrooms with real children and real teachers?

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This reminds me of the "we have to pass it to find out what's in it" argument.  It's rather astounding that public education is now regaled to taxpayers paying for standards, assessments and curriculum dictated by private companies, propped up by Federal mandates, and there is even a question of whether to support such a system.

I shouldn't be so surprised.  Since it appears we have become a nation based on the end justifies the means vs a nation based on principle and law, common core standards, longitudinal data systems and the private takeover of public education can be implemented with hardly a whimper from the politicians supposedly charged with upholding the Constitution. 

The readers' comments to the article illustrate this tension.  This comment illustrates one result of this multi-billion dollar unproven, untested and unconstitutional Nancy Pelosi style of "reform":

 in response to dianerav: 

I have neither endorsed nor rejected the Common Core national standards, for one simple reason: They are being rolled out in 45 states without a field trial anywhere. How can I say that I love them or like them or hate them when I don’t know how they will work when they reach the nation’s [...]

I retired two weeks ago, after 31 years as a public school teacher. I watched my school being infected with the ccss madness this year. It broke my heart.

A Death March? The Takeover of American Education by the Elites

To understand how and why American taxpayers are paying into an public education system that really isn't a public entity any longer, you should read this post from Potter-Williams Report detailing the privatization of public education.  There is not much add to this excellent article on the total co-opting of education by the elitist party made up of Democrat and Republican politicians, except you might want to ask your "conservative" Republican state and national legislators why they support an organization backed by George Soros dollars:

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March of the Education Elite

                  
A ruling class of education entrepreneurs has been hard at work for thirty years capitalizing on the dissatisfaction with government schools. The lucrative enterprise began back in the early eighties when the Department of Education issued a “A Nation at Risk,” a doomsday report which declared the nation’s students were falling behind the rest of the world in achievement testing.

Education reform then became a political football which Republicans grabbed from its traditional guardians, the Democrats, and took to the end zone; thus starting a movement toward privatization of the public schools. According to online website edutopia:

James Harvey, a member of the commission that produced "A Nation at Risk," expresses concern about the uses made of the report and the direction it has given to school reform. Today, he says, "educational decisions have been moved as far as possible from the classroom. Federal officials are now in a position to make decisions that would have been unimaginable even two years ago. They've established the criteria for disciplining schools, removing principals and teachers, and even defining appropriate curriculum for American classrooms."

So how did the federal government end up with so much power when Republicans are so opposed to big government? Easy. Elitist conservative right and elitist liberal left joined forces to transform the system from the ground up.

Eventually, Democrats joined with Republicans in this new ed-business and the shake-up of the different camps continues to the present day. 

How did opposite political parties converge to create the widespread public/private partnerships in education now present in cities across the country? This alignment began in earnest in 1989 when Teach for America, the well-funded teacher recruiter organization, came into being. 

TFA consists of an elitist culture of college grads gleaned mostly from top universities. Its purported mission: to “ensure kids growing up in poverty get an excellent education.” Sounds admirable until you look at whether the achievement gap has changed. According to Wendy Kopp, founder of TFA, “the needle” hasn’t moved much in the last 20 years. So, why is she still in business? Because she has a good thing going.


The touted teacher corps spawned several high rollers in the ed-biz during the last two decades. TFAers created non-profits and charter schools across the country. KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program) charter schools founded by TFA alums and now run by Richard Barth, Kopp’s husband and founding principal of TFA, hold a seat at the head of the table. The New Teachers Project became an arm of the TFA when TFA alum Michelle Rhee, took charge of the non-profit. TNTP has contracted with schools across the nation.
All this didn’t happen by accident. Kopp honed her skills while at Princeton when she helped revive a fledgling business journalism magazine put out by the Foundation for Student Communication. Her summer jobs consisted of making appointments with investors, and asking for money.

As a result, she was an excellent beggar when it came to hitting up corporations for money to keep TFA going. So, with so many high-powered business connections, why did she take donations from George Soros’ Open Society Institute out of Baltimore, Maryland? It’s well known Soros’ money goes to leftist causes. Was Kopp acting as a bridge between liberal Democrats, conservative Republicans, and Leftist billionaires? Does one’s sense of decency go out the window when millions of dollars stare her in the face?


2005: A pivotal year for comingling of political parties in education reform


When Kopp was in the process of organizing staff for her newly created non-profit back in the fall of 1989, she hired a Harvard grad introduced to her by her brother. Whitney Tilson knew finances, and he helped Kopp set up the business. After a few months with TFA, Tilson left to become a hedge fund manager and investment entrepreneur. 

The year 2005 proved to be a pivotal year for the formation of a left/right coalition in creating money-making opportunities in the world of education. 


In Steven Brill’s Class Warfare: Inside the Fight to Fix America’s Schools Whitney Tilson calls himself a lifelong Democrat, but he co-opted the education message of the right: charters, vouchers and anti-union.
In 2004 he was invited to a fundraising party for then Illinois state Senator Barack Obama at the New York City apartment of George Soros. A year later in June 2005, Tilson again met up with Senator Barack Obama who was helping Tilson and two other financiers start an ed-biz known as Democrats for Education Reform (DFER). Today DFER and Michelle Rhee’s StudentsFirst highly influence the school reform movement. 

The same names come up again and again in the tight knit club of education “reformers.” Rhee was recruited out of Cornell by TFA in 1992 and went on to manage the TFA spinoff TNTP. Rhee’s experience with TNTP brought her up close and personal with local school districts across the country. Much like Kopp, she had natural ability to fundraise from billionaire investors and to persuade superintendents and principals to contract her consulting organization to help with hiring new teachers.

Meanwhile the state of New York was undergoing a major makeover in how politicians, unions and policy setters conducted public school business. For two years Joel Klein, head of NY public schools held off a contract with Randi Weingarten, President of American Federation of Teachers. The standoff led to an arbitration hearing in the summer of 2005 where Michelle Rhee agreed to testify about teacher tenure. This self-proclaimed lifelong Democrat had joined forces with conservatives and opposed the unions’ stronghold on government schools. There’s no indication Rhee has ever denounced her Democrat affiliation even though she now looks like a Republican.

Also during 2005, Klein was influential in shutting down a contributor of the No Child Left Behind program. Democrat and education guru Diane Ravitch had worked on the NCLB bill signed into law in 2003 by George Bush. However Klein (also Democrat) threw her under the bus, therefore causing Ravitch to retaliate and claim poverty itself was the most important factor in whether a child achieves in school, not just bad teachers and accountability—as Klein, Rhee and Obama repeat often.

And in 2005, the first ever Aspen Ideas Festival was held, and Michelle Rhee, Wendy Kopp, and Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson (now Rhee’s husband) sat on an education panel together. [note: a search for a video of this panel came up blank, but Johnson spoke of this meeting in a 2008 panel discussion at the Harvard “Business Summit”; see video here]

Well before Rhee ever became DC schools chancellor; well before she and Kevin Johnson married in 2011; and well before Barack Obama became president, they all either knew each other or were acquainted with each other’s work.

So far all the people reviewed here are Democrats. Yet, Klein had become good friends with Republican Governor Jeb Bush of Florida. Bush had implemented new education rules which raised achievement levels and Klein wanted to know more about it. It didn’t take long before more Republicans and Democrats threw party loyalty aside and became pals..

Eventually, Rhee took Democrats to task for sticking with the status quo mostly held by the teachers’ unions. Even Obama praised her in his debate at Hofstra University before the 2008 elections. She obviously was on his radar most probably all the way back to 2005 when she hit the public circuit in the high profile arbitration hearings with the AFT. Is Rhee doing Obama’s bidding on the transformation of education? 

Moving Toward Centralization By Way of Elitists

The “bipartisan” outcome of the back and forth between traditional enemies has led to systemic change in how the federal government now controls much of the conversation when it comes to school reform. Like James Harvey of “A Nation at Risk” said, “Federal officials are now in a position to make decisions that would have been unimaginable even two years ago.” 

The DoED issued a Core Curriculum now used by 42 states, as well as a standardized sexual education curriculum. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has called for longer school days including Saturdays in some places. Don’t states and municipalities have specific needs which may not match the national guidelines? 

Obama ramped up his education spending when he carved $100 billion out of the stimulus bill to dangle money in front of starving school systems. Why? To help poor children achieve? Or to make the old localized systems beholden to a centralized authority?

This alliance between leftist elitists and conservative elitists is not moving away from big government; in fact, it’s moving at warp speed toward bigger government.

To get an understanding of elitists’ mindsets, here are some examples. From Jacobin website:

While visiting a KIPP school in New York City early one morning, where fifth graders were busy with drills at 7:00 a.m., Kopp quietly lamented, without a touch of irony, that her own child of the same age was still in bed. Thus, in the KIPP model, we are presented with the solution to the nation’s educational inequalities: for poor children to succeed, they must willingly submit to Taylorist institutionalization.

Elitism by its very nature causes its adherents to separate from the common masses. In elitists’ minds, they ‘have arrived’ due to their intelligence, financial stability and eagerness to succeed; but here’s the flip side to their self-congratulatory kudos:  anyone who isn’t successful must be too ignorant or too poor or have no motivation to achieve beyond their pitiable state. 

In his book Indoctrination: How 'Useful Idiots' Are Using Our Schools to Subvert American Exceptionalism, Kyle Olson shows his elitist stripes when he writes:

Education reformer Michelle Rhee, the former chancellor of Washington DC schools has said it perfectly: Schools should operate from the position that parents will do nothing to help with their child’s education. Blaming parents is no virtue and accountability is no vice…The blame lies with administrators who are unwilling to remove ineffective and burned-out teachers. The blame lies with teachers unions that are more concerned with increasing pay and benefit levels for their members than they are about teacher quality.

Olson finds it repugnant to blame parents but has no problem blaming unions, administrators, and teachers. Why? These kids weren’t dropped by a stork somewhere out in a cornfield.  If teachers are responsible for kids’ lousy grades, what exempts the people who brought the students into the world?  Whether Olson knows it or not, he’s promoting socialism. The individual parents are not responsible; no, it’s everybody else’s fault; it’s society’s fault.

He states “the blame lies with teacher unions that are more concerned with increasing pay and benefit levels for their members than they are about teacher quality,” yet he and other Rhee followers constantly equate higher salaries with increased performance. Maybe the unions are dangling some carrots of their own to get teachers to jump through hoops. Rhee can do it, but unions can’t?

The education entrepreneurs know there’s no money to be made in blaming parents—the only thing blaming parents will get you is a lot of grief and anger. Olson, Rhee, Kopp, Obama, Tilson, and all the rest of the self-appointed education engineers would be run out of every last school district if they presumed to tell inner city mothers and fathers they are doing a lousy job. It’s better just to get the tikes away from the useless, good for nothing parents and bring in TFAers and longer school days for the lower feeble minded common ruck while the ruling class get to nurture their little ones. 

The march of the education elites goes on. They alone will know what’s best for children, parents, principals and administrators.