The abrupt departure of the New York schools chancellor is only a temporary setback for the corporate 'reform' of public schools
Cathleen Black, the multimillionaire publishing executive with absolutely no background in education, has resigned as New York City schools chancellor. Her departure is a rare setback for a corporate-funded education reform movement that lauds standardised tests, non-union teachers and private management as the solution to the problems of public education.
Mayor Bloomberg was shocked by the negative response to Black's appointment ? just as he was shocked by the visceral public backlash against his elimination of term limits. Black was appointed precisely because of her lack of education experience, just as billionaires nationwide have campaigned for office as consummate non-politicians. All that our benign corporate overlords expect, of course, is the occasional "thank you".
The school privatisation movement is one of unparalleled genius. It proposes free-market solutions to a problem created by the free market: wealthy taxpayers refusing to adequately fund poor people's schools and a deindustrialised service economy that has eliminated good jobs for the working class. Once upon a time, in the 1990s, young people who wanted to change education for the better read Jonathan Kozol's Savage Inequalities. Today, they watch the film Waiting for "Superman", join Teach for America for a couple of years and work for organisations dedicated to attacking teachers' unions.
The so-called school reform movement has gained ground over the past decade. Chancellors Joel Klein, Michelle Rhee and now secretary of education Arne Duncan have made their case as tough advocates for children boldly pushing back against a bankrupt status quo. Priorities are set and billions in funding provided by the cocksure leadership at the Gates, Broad and Walton foundations. The movement has led to more testing and more charter schools. It has not, however, led to poor students getting a demonstrably better education. And the minority of charters that do work have proven impossible to scale up.
But the privatisation movement's poor showing doesn't give pause. The cash-rich ideologues are now exploiting the national education budget crisis to attack teacher tenure and push for the conversion of traditional schools into charters. As stimulus funds run out, governors are cutting aid to schools across the country and refusing higher taxes on the wealthy to generate the needed revenue. The "shock doctrine" ? Naomi Klein's term for big business taking advantage of crisis to get its way ? is the order of the day, from Wisconsin to the schoolhouse door.
With school districts set to lay off thousands of teachers, the youngest will be the first ones dismissed under union seniority rules. The New Teacher Project, the anti-union and pro-charter outfit started by erstwhile DC schools chancellor Michelle Rhee, has taken the lead in campaigning for the elimination of "last-in, first-out" layoff rules. I sympathise with a superintendent's predicament, but it is clear that this debate distracts from the most important issue at hand ? which is that it is the failure to fund education, not teachers' unions, that is destroying public schools. And changing seniority fails to deal with the fundamental problems underlying teacher quality: poor training, poor pay, poor professional development, and superficial evaluations.
In Philadelphia, public schools face a deficit of over $600m ? thanks to a $1bn cut to education by Republican Governor Tom Corbett. Wealthy districts well funded by local property taxes will escape relatively unscathed. Corbett, like privatisers all over, refuses to let this crisis go to waste: he is proposing a state-wide school voucher programme and weakened teacher tenure and seniority.
"Corbett's cuts are also part of a broader strategy ? to reshape the education landscape by creating more charter schools, offering vouchers to students in low-performing schools, changing teacher tenure laws, and instituting merit pay," writes Paul Socolar in the Philadelphia Public School Notebook. "Adoption of new charter policies or approval of a voucher bill could widen the already overwhelming District budget gap."
The governor's spokesman put it succinctly in an interview with the Philadelphia Inquirer: "We're in a [?] transformative time in education. We are putting together a number of initiatives to help fundamentally change the structure of education."
Inconveniently, the people get restless from time to time. The Philadelphia district's campaign to convert low-performing schools into charters hit a wall when high-school students staged mass walkouts in protest. Hope Moffett, a teacher suspended for speaking out against district plans, became a local folk hero.
The fascination with ? and improper fetishisation of ? data also plays a role in the campaign to privatise. As I describe in the upcoming issue of Extra!, the LA Times published a database ranking teachers based on "value-added measures" that most researchers have found to be imprecise and inconsistent. Yet the New York Times may soon follow suit.
In 2010, former DC schools chancellor Michelle Rhee used these measures to fire 165 teachers. With powerbrokers in thrall to performance tables, students are taught to the test while teachers and administrators increasingly tamper with answer sheets in order to ensure that they make the grade. As Dana Goldstein describes it:
"Campbell's Law states that incentives corrupt. In other words, the more punishments and rewards ? such as merit pay ? are associated with the results of any given test, the more likely it is that the test's results will be rendered meaningless, either through outright cheating or through teaching to the test in a way that narrows the curriculum and renders real learning obsolete. In the era of No Child Left Behind, Campbell's Law has proved true again and again."
In a telling gaffe last week, President Obama criticised the excessive emphasis on standardised tests. He noted that his daughters, enrolled at the elite Washington Quaker school, Sidwell Friends, were able to engage in intellectual exploration without high-stakes exams hanging over their head.
"One thing I never want to see happen is schools that are just teaching the test because then you're not learning about the world, you're not learning about different cultures, you're not learning about science, you're not learning about math [?] All you're learning about is how to fill out a little bubble on an exam and little tricks that you need to do in order to take a test and that's not going to make education interesting."
Ironically, it is Obama's very own department of education, under Secretary Duncan, that is pushing for more tests at higher and higher stakes. One blog at Education Week trumpeted "Obama Blasts His Own Education Policies". Sasha and Malia are among the minority of children who are wealthy or lucky enough to go to progressive private schools that provide a liberal arts education and "teach the whole child". Poor public school students will sit through test prep classes.
The school reform movement has not changed the general character and trajectory of poor schools: fewer libraries, fewer humanities classes and fewer music programmes ? just plain less of everything that counts as real education and is not mind-numbingly boring. (Interestingly, a recent study in Philadelphia found that young people who had dropped out of public schools cited "boredom" as one of the main reasons they stopped showing up.) While some of the movement's self-described liberals undoubtedly have good intentions, the strategy is effectively the same as any conservative effort to hobble the public sector: defund government so that it is less effective and then use that ineffectiveness to argue for further privatisation.
As a recent debate in South Carolina makes clear, "school choice" imposes cuts on the schools that can least take it, while costing taxpayers more. The budget crises have created a window of opportunity for the privatisation movement, speeding up an already deleterious cycle: divert money from traditional education through vouchers and charters, so that cash-starved traditional public schools continue to decline. The forces making the case for "reform" have never been stronger ? and they will not be diverted by the temporary blip of Cathleen Black's early retirement.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/apr/07/schools-school-funding
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