The pandemic has been rough on teachers, but there has for years been an organized effort to end a professional teaching workforce by politicians and big businesses.
In 1992, The Nation’s cover story by Margaret Spillane and Bruce Shapiro described the meeting of President H. W. Bush and a roomful of Fortune 500 CEOs who planned to launch a bold new industrial venture to save the nation’s schoolchildren.
The report titled, “A small circle of friends: Bush’s new American schools. (New American Schools Development Corp.),” also called NASDC, didn’t discuss saving public schools or teachers. They viewed schools as failed experiments, an idea promoted by the Reagan administration’s A Nation at Risk, frightening Americans into believing schools were to blame for the country’s problems.
The circle believed their ideas would break the mold and mark the emergence of corporate America as the savior of the nation’s schoolchildren.
The organization fell apart, but the ideas are still in play, and corporations with deep pockets will not quit until they get the kind of profitable education they want, for which they benefit.
They have gone far in destroying public education and the teaching profession throughout the years, not to mention programs for children, like special education.
Here are the ideas from that early meeting, extracted from The Nation’s report, with my comments. Many will look eerily familiar.
. . . “monolithic top-down education philosophy,” which disrespected teachers, parents and communities alike.
NCLB, Race to the Top, Every Student Succeeds Act, and Common Core State Standards disregarded teachers’ expertise and degraded them based on high-stakes test scores.
These policies also left parents and communities feeling disengaged in their schools.
. . . disregard for the credentials of education professionals by proposing that business executives with no classroom experience be installed as C.E.O.s of schools.
School superintendents who rose from teaching and principal careers were frequently replaced by those from the outside who had never worked with children or in public schools. Schools were run by attorneys and politicians, even bank executives.
Teach for America and fast-track (5 weeks of training) teacher programs cheaply displace real teachers who earn university degrees. Many of these individuals with minimal preparation have gone on to lead school districts and state education programs, promoting anti-public education/teacher policies.
New Leaders promotes those without a teaching background to be school leaders.
. . . opposition to lawsuits by the families of urban schoolchildren who challenged the state’s vast school-funding inequities.
School districts have been able to shirk their responsibility to funding inequities found in poor schools.
Consider how the State of Texas was able to deny students their special education rights. See: Texas Illegally Excluded Thousands From Special Education, Federal Officials Say, The New York Times cited below.
. . . support for standardized national knowledge testing.
Testing should be a tool for educators, but with high-stakes standardized testing, and tying teachers to test scores. It has been used to inaccurately show teachers as failing (Will, 2021).
It harmed students too, making third-grade retention, known to be harmful, a reality.
These tests have been devastating for poor and marginalized children.
Only one proposal involved an African-American educator in a top leadership role.
How could this be, when America faced challenges with urban schools when Brown v. the Board of Education still needed to be addressed in America’s schools?
. . . a clear majority of NASDC’s grants went to proposals that conform to at least the broad outlines of the private-sector, market-driven philosophy . . .
In a 2006 Education Next article Unrequited Promise, Jeffrey Mirel states:
. . . NASDC would be a sort of venture capitalist for education, constantly evaluating its investments and continuing to fund only those designs that proved their effectiveness.
Today corporations and venture philanthropy cash in on social impact bonds regarding schools.
. . . several NASDC design proposals are clearly aimed at scuttling democratically accountable, community-based and teacher-centered public schooling.
In 2014 The Washington Post’s Valerie Strauss article was titled Netflix’s Reed Hastings has a big idea: Kill elected school boards.
A Minneapolis consulting group will establish “charter schools” no longer answerable to local school boards.
The original charter school concept by educator Ray Budde was for groups of teachers to run under the jurisdiction of the local school board.
The National Alliance for Restructuring Education, based in Rochester, New York, will “apply principles of Total Quality Management,” learned from “America’s best corporations,” to classrooms.
The National Alliance for Restructuring Education now called the National Center on Education and the Economy and was originally the Carnegie Forum on Education and the NCEE’s CEO is Marc Tucker who wrote the 1986 report by A Nation Prepared: Teachers for the 21st Century.
Think high-stakes standards, over-focus on the school workforce connection, and degrading teacher preparation programs.
Former Education Secretary William Bennett will establish a network of quasi-private schools independent of school district authority. In Bennett’s schools, “principals will assume the role of C.E.O.” Bennett’s curriculums will be based on his own list of Great Books.
Bennett, education secretary under President Reagan, became one of the founders of K-12 Inc. Now Stride, an online company boasting full-year revenue in the range of $1.56 billion to $1.6 billion in public funds with proven poor results.
If ever there was a poor example of the market weeding out bad programs for children, Bennett’s program is it.
I have learned that Bill Bennett has been selected to be on Virginia Governor Glen Youngkin’s education transition team.
Here is an article Bennett co-authored with Richard Collins about student achievement in Virginia. Collins is the President of the Today Foundation and CEO of Istation heavily supportive of online learning.
At-risk youths will be offered not support services but a special effort at “character building.”
Republican character education assumes the negative in students.
The Democratic version of this is Social-Emotional Learning.
Both are controversial and poise the question, how much student behavior shaping is appropriate in public schools.
Perhaps most chilling, many of the plans approved by NASDC use technology, along with low-cost, nonprofessional classroom assistants, as a way of radically reducing the authority and presence of teachers.
Teachers were replaced by an Electronic Teaching Center and an engineering conglomerate and a military contractor.
Two elementary schools in Massachusetts emphasized a “pervasive use of the computer.”
Teachers worried about teacher-pupil ratios, but that wouldn’t be a problem with computers. Small classrooms aren’t necessary when you can plug a child onto a computer screen.
The Community Learning Centers of Minnesota point out that in their academies, ratios of personnel versus technology may “differ radically from those currently found in public schools.”
The authors draw their last conclusion:
All these high-tech plans implicitly disregard the power of teachers as professionals and students as thinkers.
In these schemes, teachers are conduits and cops, carrying information and enforcing rules.
Children are little more than receptacles, whose ability to contain the prescribed information can best be measured in an objective national knowledge test.
They believed these plans ignored the abundance of social science research showing that children learn best through daily interactions between teachers, students, and parents.
All these years later this plan has come far and America could lose its public schools and a great profession.
__________
References
Spillane, M. and Shapiro, B. A small circle of friends Bush’s new American schools (New American Schools Development Corp.). The Nation. Sept. 21, 1992.
Rosenthal, B.M. (2018, Jan 11). Texas Illegally Excluded Thousands From Special Education, Federal Officials Say. The New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/11/us/texas-special-education.html.
Will, M. Efforts to Toughen Teacher Evaluations Show No Positive Impact on Students. Education Week. November 29, 2021. Retrieved from https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/efforts-to-toughen-teacher-evaluations-show-no-positive-impact-on-students/2021/11.
Strauss, V. (2014, Netflix’s Reed Hastings has a big idea: Kill elected school boards. The Washington Post. Retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2014/03/14/netflixs-reed-hastings-has-a-big-idea-kill-elected-school-boards/.
This is also an especially important article. Educational system stretched beyond capacity fails students | The Seattle Times
Thank you for your analysis. How is it that so-called intelligent people can ignore the data on their own stupendous failures? I am assuming that these people realize that their workforce depends on a well educated public, and yet they opt for the short term profits they can amass.
You make an excellent point! They don’t seem to be thinking long-term. Thank you.
Children have become pawns in a cynical moneymaking operation by corporate vampires like Bill Bennett, enabled by short-sighted politicians and local school boards staffed by opportunistic political hack wannabes.
Sadly, I agree.
The Chromebook has become the modern day Trojan Horse gifted by the tens of millions to teachers in every school in the country. Hidden inside are the addictive cyber-drugs required for intellectual and emotional take over of the public schools. The demise of the teaching profession is just a click away.
Truth! Nonstop screens. Thank you, Rick.
A high school teacher friend just described the affect of the vast majority of students who finally returned to school year: “catatonic, borderline unresponsive”
Another teacher friend described the classes sent to the auditorium because of staff/sub shortages: “transfixed and complacent as they stare into their phones for 40 minutes”
Would it be better too radical to suggest returning to pencil and paper? Screens seem to negate the requirement of thinking.
Not radical at all. Many pluses to writing. Another great point. Thank you, Rick!
Absolutely true. In my case, my gr3 son struggles with just about every digital format – it’s too easy to just guess and click, there’s no natural drive to do the work (and they do t have scratch paper either).
But what really troubles me is how many of our teachers defend the use of EdTech and consider the results to be some kind of gospel fact.
One of the best students in my son’s class tested on Renaissance’s AR star testing that his reading level was 4.9 at the beginning of 3rd grade, yet is also told this is only the 67th percentile! What an absolute joke! Meaningless.
Thank you, Paula. I share the same concerns about teachers buying into Ed Tech. It can be useful, but some of the programs are crummy with strange results as you point out.
I’m particularly concerned about tech reading programs that make huge promises to parents and teachers with little peer reviewed proof. Many of these programs do their own research highlighting wonderful results. I find this concerning.
“In 2014 The Washington Post’s Valerie Strauss article was titled Netflix’s Reed Hastings has a big idea: Kill elected school boards.
A Minneapolis consulting group will establish “charter schools” no longer answerable to local school boards.
The original charter school concept by educator Ray Budde was for groups of teachers to run under the jurisdiction of the local school board.”
Albert Shanker, way back the late 1960s/early 70s (when I first started teaching in NYC) suggested that teachers, not corporations or education publishers should be given the opportunities in their public schools to pilot innovations. How this got bastardized into the charter movement we have now is bewildering and sad. It is like a runaway train.
I have been doing a lot of reading about school change and how difficult it is to change everyday practices within a public school system. There is enough blame to go around to all the players.
I have taught at all levels of the public schools, and I was a director of a cooperative nursery school and local school board member. I also was a teacher educator for 14 years prior to retirement. Frankly, I think teacher educators need to provide teacher education students the tools and experiences where they use them, which will prepare them to mobilize and advocate for good teaching practices and against bad policies. This country talks about and treats educators as though they are incapable of helping children learn without a set script that tells them what to say and how to carry out learning activities. The individual child is never at the center of policy makers thinking.
Thank you for reminding us about Albert Shanker. He used to get blamed for charter schools, but he saw them much differently than they are now.
Thank you for your comment: good thoughts here, Nora.
My thanks to Diane Ravitch.
https://dianeravitch.net/2021/12/10/nancy-bailey-an-overview-of-the-war-against-the-teaching-profession/
Maybe this will fix it!
South Dakota teachers scramble for dollar bills in ‘demeaning’ game
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/dec/13/teachers-scramble-dollar-bills-south-dakota-dash-for-cash
Footage goes viral showing teachers stuffing notes into clothing to fund classrooms while audience cheers
South Dakota teachers scramble for dollar bills to buy classroom supplies in half-time game
[video-00:25 https://youtu.be/oGiF30dJg4M%5D
Josh Taylor / 13 Dec 2021 / The Guardian
A competition pitting 10 teachers against each other to scramble for dollar bills to fund school supplies in a city in South Dakota has been described as “demeaning” and drawn comparisons with the Netflix hit series Squid Game.
The local newspaper the Argus Leader reported $5,000 (£3,770) in single dollar bills were laid out on the ice skating rink during the Sioux Falls Stampede hockey game on Saturday night, and the teachers from nearby schools competed to grab as many as possible in less than five minutes.
Footage of the competition that went viral on social media showed teachers stuffing the notes down their jumpers and into hats while the audience cheered.
The money was reportedly donated by CU Mortgage Direct to fund teaching supplies and classroom repairs.
“With everything that has gone on for the last couple of years with teachers and everything, we thought it was an awesome group thing to do for the teachers,” Ryan Knudson, a marketing spokesperson for CU Mortgage Direct, told the Argus Leader.
The American Federation of Teachers president, Randi Weingarten, tweeted that the display was demeaning. “This just feels demeaning … teachers shouldn’t have to dash for dollars for classroom supplies,” she said. No doubt people probably intended it to be fun, but from the outside it feels terrible.”
This just feels demeaning .. teachers shouldn’t have to dash for dollars for classroom supplies… No doubt people probably intended it to be fun, but from the outside it feels terrible https://t.co/bb14T5sPc4
— Randi Weingarten (@rweingarten) December 13, 2021
On social media the “dash for cash” footage was described as “humiliating” and “dystopian”. Some people likened the footage to scenes from Squid Game or the Hunger Games franchise.
Teachers all over the US are burnt out, but parents’ compassion has gone
Emma Brockes
The teachers involved in the competition appreciated the cash and said they planned to use it to buy flexible seating, such as standing desks or wobble chairs, or document cameras so they could upload lessons online, the Argus Leader reported.
“I think it’s really cool when the community offers an opportunity like this for things that educators a lot of times pay out of pocket for,” Alexandria Kuyper, a fifth-grade teacher at Discovery elementary school said.
“The road to hell is paved with good intentions,” comes to mind. Thank you for sharing this despite it being tough to watch.
I hate this online learning crap I just finished my AA degree at Cerritos a junior college in California and the last few classes I took where online in 2020 and I hated it. I had trouble with in class studies and did not earn my degree for years.I am working part time at a school district in cafeteria and the social distancing means many kids are zoned out from mostly online learning which as an ineffective learning model may still be going on in the classroom despite the children’s presence in a school building. Online learning saves money for colleges and universities and some online degrees excluding a junior colleges are almost as expensive as in person learning just look at random accredited colleges web-pages tuition area like Brandman University or Devry Institute. The cost is why there is so much of this online learning crap to save money.
My thanks to the NEPC.
https://nepc.colorado.edu/blog/driving-teachers-out?fbclid=IwAR2VKCxoUwqrfqBicNARxQz42faiURcO9jWqUqS7XoqjVnDcXwzph_kk_ko