Frustrated by public schools? Look no further than the corporate education reformers and what they have done to public education.
Education Secretary DeVos and her corporate billionaire friends have been chipping away at the fabric of democratic public schools for over thirty years!
The problems we see in public schools today are largely a result of what they did to schools, the high-stakes testing and school closures, intentional defunding, ugly treatment of teachers, lack of support staff, segregated charter schools, vouchers that benefit the wealthy, Common Core State Standards, intrusive online data collection, and diminishing special education services.
Big business waged a battle on teachers and their schools years ago. The drive was to create a business model to profit from tax dollars. Now they want to blame teachers for their corporate-misguided blunders! It’s part of their plan to make schools so unpleasant, parents will have no choice but to leave.
Americans used to be relatively happy with their public schools. By 2019, they were frustrated, but they still believed in teachers!
Back up to the early 1970s. Ray Budde, a teacher turned principal turned college professor, created the idea of charter schools for teachers to run. His colleagues weren’t interested. Public schools were appreciated. It wasn’t until after the Reagan administration’s A Nation at Risk in 1983, that charter schools were considered. But it took another eleven years before we had the first charter school. They’re much different than Budde’s original concept. Most are not run by teachers, but by individuals who have little understanding of children.
From the Reagan administration’s A Nation at Risk (1983), to Economist Milton Friedman’s free market ideology; from IBM’s Louis V. Gerstner, Jr’s. Reinventing Education: Entrepreneurship in America’s Public Schools (1995), to NCLB and Race to the Top with its Common Core State Standards; from “no excuses” and grit, to replacing teacher-led classrooms with tech charters and facilitators, the individuals behind these initiatives are corporate.
The DeVos family has their own history with corporate school reform in Michigan, including Detroit. In “How Betsy DeVos and her money has shaped education in Michigan,” by Brian McVicarhis we learn about the DeVos charter school advocacy group called the Great Lakes Education Project.
Valerie Strauss from The Answer Sheet wrote about DeVos’s influence on Michigan schools after DeVos’s appointment as education secretary. Strauss refers to Stephen Henderson, an editorial page editor of the Free Press, who said, In Detroit, parents of school-age children have plenty of choices, thanks to the nation’s largest urban network of charter schools. What remains in short supply is quality.
So, it’s odd to hear Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’s reaction to recent scores on NAEP testing, like she doesn’t see her past role, or the role of her corporate friends, in the draconian changes that have taken place in schools.
DeVos said, For more than three decades, I — and many others — have said that America’s antiquated approach to education fails too many kids. But she ignores the control corporations have had of public education. She acts like they’ve been sitting on the sidelines. But we know that’s not true.
If only students like Jamarria Hall, who wants to sue Detroit public schools for not giving him a decent education, could sue the corporate intruders, like DeVos and her friends, or another Michigander Eli Broad, who have impacted those schools for years by pushing substandard charter schools into the State of Michigan, especially Detroit.
I student taught in an elementary school in Detroit, in 1973. Schools were certainly not perfect, but my modest school did a good job.
The third-grade teachers were excellent reading teachers. They organized rotating small groups of students based on their skill needs decoding letters and words. There were no data walls. No child appeared to compare themselves unfavorably to other children.
Students were encouraged to read, did free reading, lots of writing, and had access to plenty of books. The school had a nice library with a librarian who often read beautiful and funny stories to the class. They spent time studying social studies, science, and art and music. Teachers worked closely with the PTA and reached out to parents.
There was no testing obsession. Students didn’t fear failing third grade. They were continually learning, and most liked school. There were twenty-two students in the class.
Teachers did their own assessment, and they discussed the results with each other at their grade level meetings. The school had a counselor and I believe a nurse stationed at the school. We worried about the students and addressed concerns about issues like why some showed up without mittens in the cold weather.
Students did class projects to help remember what they learned in their subjects. For science, we created a rocket out of a huge cardboard box. We painted it and spent time studying the solar system. Children took turns sitting in the rocket pretending they were astronauts.
This school had an excellent Learning Center where teachers could share materials to cut down on costs. They had a nice collection of resources for every subject.
My supervising teacher was kind, well-prepared, and tough. She expected daily written lesson plans which she reviewed with me before I taught. She was an excellent mentor!
Where’s that school today? I wish I could go back and visit, but it closed years ago, razed and turned into a housing development. It was shuttered like 225 other public schools in Detroit!
For the record, there are many who claim the NAEP scores are not as bad as some seem to think. It might be a bit confusing. What I know is this. If public schools are succeeding it is because of the teachers and parents who keep them alive, and if they are failing, it is because of DeVos and her corporate friends who have fought against teachers and public education for years.
I certainly agree that ed deformers, particularly those with the double agenda of profit and pushing some reactionary religious politics onto public institutions are part of the disease. But like Donald Trump, they are more symptom than the true disease. What contributes above and beyond any individual or collective attempt to commodify public education is the corrupt system in which American public schools have existed from their very beginning. Capitalism, slavery, institutionalized racism, sexism, etc., all conspire to undermine even the most well-meaning efforts to have public schools make wholesale social improvements. Education alone cannot cure poverty, disease, despair, violence, escapism through alcohol and drugs, and a host of other social ills that are a feature, not a flaw, in the American way. And there is ample evidence from history that whenever education or other public institutions make even slight headway against economic inequity, the backlash from the elite is swift and thorough. Are we worse off under an idiot like Devos than we were under an idiot like Arne Duncan? This game has been rigged since the Reagan years, and what we are seeing now is simply the inevitable result of the Empire Striking Back. When Devos and Trump are gone, it’s not going to get better except in surface ways. Dan Meyer said that the mathematics classroom needs a makeover, but that’s just the tiniest tip of the iceberg of needed makeovers.
Thanks, Michael. I appreciate your insight and I agree with most of what you say. Schools always reflect social issues, and teachers have little control over social ills. But how should we educate America’s children? Seems like public education should have evolved to something better by now. Instead it has been going backwards. I’m thinking especially about Raleigh, NC. I think there was real hope there when it came to diversity.
Obviously, I don’t have “the” answer, but I keep coming back to Dewey and books like DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION. Despite the hatchet job done on him by various conservative and reactionary thinkers, he’s anything but the anti-Christ of American public thought. He knew long ago that for America to realize its true democratic potential, its public schools needed to educate citizens to function as political animals in a democracy. Naturally, more repressive forces feared and loathed such an eventuality. And so much of the last 100 years has been spent blaming every imaginable problem in the United States on Dewey’s allegedly “permissive” approach to education. Alfie Kohn, among others, has debunked much of that nonsense. So did my mentor at the University of Michigan School of Education, the late Fred Goodman. But if you want to waste your time, just mention “John Dewey” to any of the usual suspects and you’ll find a bunch of people who “know” that Dewey is the villain of modern American education, but have never read a single word he wrote.
There’s no single right way to educate our children, but there are certainly an enormous number of bad ways, most of which have underlying assumptions about kids and about the purpose of public education in a democracy that are dead wrong, anti-child, and, frankly, anti-democratic.
Very well said, Michael. Thank you.
While you were teaching thus in Detroit in 1973, the Japanese were making much better cars at cheaper prices than were GM, Ford, and Chrysler; factories closed, families moved to the suburbs or other states, and Detroit continued its long tailspin. If the American economy cannot compete with other nations, its people will suffer. The American economy can compete, but it isn’t doing well in all areas, and it certainly isn’t doing well in Detroit’s schools. But to blame the collapse of Detroit on the DeVoses is unconvincing.
Instead, Detroit Public Schools should have its district incorporation abolished by the state, and it should instead be governed by an eastern Michigan education ministry competent to compete with those of educationally leading districts and states such as Singapore and Switzerland.
You may have missed the various failed charter experiments and state takeovers of public schools in Detroit, Pontiac, etc. Devos was the head of one such disaster.
As for the connection between failed schools and the failure of American corporations to compete effectively with foreign competitors, some people might suggest that you’re blaming victims and reversing the chain of causality (a nice double-header!) I suspect that the people in charge at GM, Ford, Chrysler, weren’t products of DPS. Ditto Flint PS, Pontiac PS. Rather, those were people with Ivy League MBAs who were invariably white folks from “Points Elsewhere.” When they utterly missed the relationship between gas guzzlers, foreign oil imports, and a major shift in the buying habits of the vast majority of Americans (who weren’t making sufficient money to afford to buy and fuel the gigantic, heavy monstrosities Detroit continued to produce while automakers in Japan, Korea, etc., correctly anticipated the economic future, these fat cats still made fortunes while they shut down factories in the Rust Belt and blamed unions and sneaky Japs. But that somehow is the fault of the school districts in the cities that the Big Three bled to death and then abandoned? Sure. Cool story, bro. Tell it again.
Bruce William Smith, I do remember that time vividly. And years later I looked into why the Japan comparison disappeared from the education conversation. I agree with Michael.
The late educational researcher Gerald Bracey explained the difficulties that come with comparing economies to student test scores. He said, “Japan’s ‘bubble burst’ even though students still aced their tests in America, students continued to core in the middle of the pack, but the economy boomed and the World Economic Forum ranked us No. 1 in global competitiveness among over 100 nations.”
You can find the whole article here. Thank you for commenting.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/believing-the-worst-about_b_36562
Nancy, I’m afraid you and Michael may have missed my point. DPS were the victims of demographic changes in the district that were brought on by international economic competition, changes that were inevitable due to corporate capitalism: if the CEOs hadn’t shut down those uncompetitive factories, their boards would have removed them and brought in people who would. You’re right that American economic competitiveness is currently ranked more highly than Japan’s, while the Japanese beat American students on tests; but educational performance is just one factor in competitiveness rankings — nonetheless it’s a factor, and America’s poor investment in its future (look at our insane climate policies and record-breaking deficits, in addition to the poor returns on educational investment we’ve been getting) makes predictable a fall in its future competitiveness rankings, when American youth will struggle ever more desperately to find worthwhile employment.
So it’s a good thing those corporate elites punished the hell out of people who had precisely nothing to do with the horrific decision-making of those corporate elites. Otherwise, the actual guilty parties and the boards that paid them might be answerable to stockholders.
Seeing “return on investment” proffered as a relevant phrase in educational policy actually causes temporary loss of vision, a chronic ringing in the ears, heart palpitations, and the nagging feeling that one is reading the words of a non-educator.
Nancy thank you for your article. Itwas well written but failed to include the American Eugenica movement was procedes everything you discussed. Without this important context your article confuses readers to what the real issues of standardized testing and Common Core are.
Thank you for your observation, Jeff. I appreciate your feedback.
My thanks to Diane Ravitch who has a better title!
https://dianeravitch.net/2019/11/09/nancy-bailey-if-only-students-could-sue-betsy-devos-and-the-corporate-reformers-for-the-damage-they-have-done/
The money Ms DeVious gets for the schools goes on repairing her yachts .
I don’t think she needs the money for that even if she was that corrupt, but I don’t think she is aware of what it’s like to be a teacher in a poor school that has no resources.