Life in 21st century America is a hectic, demanding business and keeping up with current events can be like trying to drink from a water cannon. By cosmic standards, humans have developed mad communication skills virtually overnight. We have evolved from grunters to spinmeisters who communicate incessantly with each other. And, today, we are inundated, 24/7, with information from global events to what the kids would like for supper. Human brains could conceivably be short-circuited by this torrent of data but, happily, we are equipped with filters.
Linguists study some of those filters in a discipline they call semiotics -- the study of signs and symbols. And one way that we sort through the daily barrage of "signs and symbols" linguists refer to as salience, which simply means ranking communications by their relative importance to a particular audience.
Salience plays a critical role in interpersonal communication, politics, propaganda and mass media and has a huge impact on human psychology and sociology. It is a factor in how and why humans form groups and get things done and, more recently, why things "go viral" and rise to the top of the news cycle, sometimes inexplicably.
I have studied such things and ultimately made a successful career from that study because people who understand such weird science, and how to put it into play, are scarce but valuable commodity to American government and corporations.
If I'm close to losing you, hang in there. I'm done with linguistics. This is merely my prelude -- albeit relevant, as I'll eventually show -- to another topic with more general appeal which lies below the orange calligraphic.
Over the last few weeks, one news story that has risen to the top of the media heap, stayed there and even attracted some foreign attention is the story of the Jefferson County school board where a newly-elected conservative majority went to work "reforming" Jefferson County schools. Teacher sick-outs, student/parent walkouts and overflow audiences at contentious school board meetings ensued. All of it capturing quite a lot of media attention, so, if you're unfamiliar with the details, the Google has lots of them for you.
My interest in the story has become the "why" of it. Why now, why these particular people and why reform public education by putting an end to it.
Where did the idea of school reform come from and what does it mean to those who promote it?
Diane Ravitch, an historian, an educational policy analyst, and a research professor at NYU who served as a U.S. Assistant Secretary of Education under George H W Bush and Bill Clinton, wrote in an article, last year:
The claim that the public schools are in decline is not new. In his Pulitzer Prize-winning book “Anti-intellectualism in American Life,” Richard Hofstadter characterized writing on education in the United States as “a literature of acid criticism and bitter complaint . . . The educational jeremiad is as much a feature of our literature as the jeremiad in the Puritan sermons.” From the 1820s to our own time, reformers have complained about low standards, ignorant teachers, and incompetent school boards. He noted that anyone longing for the “good old days” would have difficulty finding a time when critics were not bemoaning the quality of the public schools.
There is a tendency nowadays to hark back with nostalgia to the mythical good old days, usually imagined as about forty or fifty years ago . . . those who now sharply criticize the public schools speak fondly of an era when most schools were racially segregated; when public schools were not required to accept children with physical, mental, and emotional handicaps; when there were relatively few students who did not speak or read English; and when few graduated from high school and went to college.
The current dialogues on school reform turn on the demonization of public education and unionized teachers to the extent that our public schools are such a clear and present to American superiority and national security that only radical reform measures starting yesterday can possibly save us all from global irrelevance and possible extinction.
So. Who are these educational visionaries and soothsayers, this time around? Well, they're an interesting mix of strange bedfellows - politicians, self-styled edupreneurs, billionaires, venture capitalists, hedge fund managers and ideologues.
I'll allow them to explain themselves:
In 2012, Melinda Gates was interviewed on the PBS “NewsHour.” When the interviewer asked her what was “working and what can scale up,” she responded:
If you look back a decade ago, when we started into this work, there wasn’t even a conversation across the nation about the fact that our schools were broken, fundamentally broken. And I think that dialogue has changed. I think the American public has woken up to the fact now that schools are broken. We’re not serving our kids well.
They’re not being educated for the — for technology society.
Grover Norquist, head of
Americans for Tax Reform and arguably one of the most influential Republican strategists in Washington, said in a 1998 interview with
Insight:
School choice reaches right into the heart of the Democratic coalition and takes people out of it.
Terry Moe, a senior fellow at the conservative
Hoover Institution and co-author of the book
Politics, Markets, and America's Schools, said in an interview with the
Heartland Institute:
The issue comes down to "a matter of power."
The NEA and AFT (national teachers' unions) "have a lot of money for campaign contributions and for lobbying. "They also have a lot of electoral clout because they have many activists out in the trenches in every political district. . . . No other group can claim this kind of geographically uniform political activity. They are everywhere."
School vouchers are a way to diminish that power. "School choice allows children and money to leave the system, and that means there will be fewer public teacher jobs, lower union membership, and lower dues.
Media mogul, Rupert Murdoch, who is newly an "educator" with his
Amplify education technology corporation, said in a 2010 press release:
When it comes to K through 12 education we see a $500 billion sector in the U.S. alone that is waiting desperately to be transformed by big breakthroughs that extend the reach of great teaching.
That year Murdoch hired Joel Klein, former chancellor of the New York City Department of Education and outspoken school reformer to run
Amplify. A few months later
Amplify was awarded a $2.7 million contract from the city.
It boils down to what Chris Hedges told Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman:
. . . the federal government spends some $600 billion a year on education — and the corporations want it. That’s what’s happening. And that comes through charter schools. It comes through standardized testing. And it comes through breaking teachers’ unions and essentially hiring temp workers, people who have very little skills.”
And, in America today, whatever corporations want, politicians do their darnedest to get for them.
Enter Wall Street
In 2012, Jeff Faux, author of The Servant Economy explained why Wall Street is suddenly interested in the privatization of public schools:
It is well known, although rarely acknowledged in the press, that the reform movement has been financed and led by the corporate class. For over twenty years large business oriented foundations, such as Gates (Microsoft), Walton (Wal-Mart) and Broad (Sun Life) have poured billions into charter school start-ups, sympathetic academics and pundits, media campaigns (including Hollywood movies) and sophisticated nurturing of the careers of privatization promoters who now dominate the education policy debate from local school boards to the US Department of Education.
In recent years, hedge fund operators, leverage-buy-out artists and investment bankers have joined the crusade. They finance schools, sit on the boards of their associations and the management companies that run them, and -- most important -- have made support of charter schools one of the criteria for campaign giving in the post-Citizens United era. Since most Republicans are already on board for privatization, the political pressure has been mostly directed at Democrats.
(See Andrew Cuomo)
And there's more and more money to go around. A Dissent Magazine article reported that school privatizers are even bankrolling local school board candidates, in one case spending over $630,000 to elect two members to the school board in Douglas County Colorado.
Faux points out why all of that investment is justified:
Having been rescued from the consequences of its own folly by the Bush/Obama bailouts with its de-regulated privileges intact, Wall Street is once more on the prowl for the new "big thing" -- a new source of potential profits upon which to build the next lucrative asset bubble.
The financial bubble of the 1990s was driven by new business start-ups exploiting technologies whose development had been subsidized by the taxpayers. The bubble of the 2000's was built on the boom in subprime mortgages organized and subsidized by Federal housing programs. But with a virtual Washington consensus on cutting back public spending, investors have little expectation of new government money being poured into some dormant economic sector on a scale sufficient to generate widespread speculative excitement.
Education privatization would not, per se, create a net new stimulus for the economy. But by diverting large existing flows of money from the public to the private sector it would create new profit-making ventures that could be capitalized and transformed into stocks, derivatives and leveraged securities. The pot has been sweetened by a 39 percent federal tax credit for financing charter school construction that can double an investor's return in seven years. The prospect of new speculative opportunities could well recharge the animal spirits upon which Wall Street depends.
Next, enter the
American Legislative Executive Council (ALEC), located at the intersection of Wall Street and Main Street, to write the laws that corporations want and hand them off to state legislators.
ALEChas been whacking away at education since 1985 and was instrumental in the first school charter in Milwaukkee, WI, in 1990. And it was Wisconsin Gov Tommy Thompson, an early ALEC member who, in 1990, unwittingly described ALEC's policy modus operandi to a tee:
Thompson said he “loved” ALEC meetings, “because I always found new ideas, and then I’d take them back to Wisconsin, disguise them a little bit, and declare [they were] mine.”
ALEC's progress in pushing privatization has been up and down over those intervening thirty years because, despite all of the political cant and demonization of public schools and teachers unions coming from the Right, Americans still seem to love their public schools. Public schools have educated most American children for 150 years and it's harder to launch a radical attack, including lots of mis- and dis-information, on such a universally known and loved institution.
The most common challenge to public education demonizers is: "if our schools are and have been so awful, why is America so powerful, respected and successful, today?
Over time ALEC has learned not to say the "v-word" (voucher) nor the "p-word" (privatization) and has hyped its policies using more populist-sounding euphemisms like "choice," "scholarship" and "tax credit." Who doesn't like tax credits?
But that is ALEC's public profile, when ALEC and its Corporate boosters hold their secretive get-togethers, the gloves tend to come off:
ALEC’s 2010 Report Card on American Education called on members and allies to “Transform the system, don’t tweak it,” likening the group’s current legislative strategy to a game of whack-a-mole: introduce so many pieces of model legislation that there is “no way the person with the mallet [teachers’ unions] can get them all.”
ALEC’s agenda includes:
§ Introducing market factors into teaching, through bills like the National Teacher Certification Fairness Act.
§ Privatizing education through vouchers, charters and tax incentives, especially through the Parental Choice Scholarship Program Act and Special Needs Scholarship Program Act, whose many spinoffs encourage the creation of private schools for specific populations: children with autism, children in military families, etc.
§ Increasing student testing and reporting, through more “accountability,” as seen in the Education Accountability Act, Longitudinal Student Growth Act, One-to-One Reading Improvement Act and the Resolution Supporting the Principles of No Child Left Behind.
§ Chipping away at local school districts and school boards, through its 2009 Innovation Schools and School Districts Act and more. Proposals like the Public School Financial Transparency Act and School Board Freedom to Contract Act would allow school districts to outsource auxiliary services.
ALEC typically targets low-hanging fruit, first, for its education offensives -- states with true local control of public schools by elected school boards like Colorado, Texas, New Jersey, Arizona, DC -- offer a path of least resistance if the "right people" are elected to school boards and they are networked to the "right people" in the state legislature.
At this year's meeting in Dallas, TX the ALEC's education working group set these goals for updating existing charter school laws in the states:
The "Public Charter Schools Act" would expand on ALEC's pre-existing "Next Generation Charter Schools Act" and enrich ALEC members like K12, Inc., the nation's largest provider of online charter schools or cyber schools. It would allow privately-operated charter schools to continue taking public funds, but without public accountability. The bill would give charter schools carte blanche to operate without being "subject to the state's education statutes or any state or local rule, regulation, policy, or procedure relating to non-charter public schools within an applicable local school district..."
The related "Public Charter Schools Funding Act" restates charters' autonomy from the rule of law and democratically-elected school boards while still giving each charter school "one hundred percent" of the state and federal education funding "calculated pursuant to the state's funding formula for school districts."
A lot of parents with young children in public schools today were in diapers, themselves, when this movement got rolling but with unlimited funds for outreach and marketing the the worn-out ideas of corporate takeover of public education are made to sound hip, cutting edge and too promising to pass up. Unfortunately, those young parents are getting only the Madison Avenue part of the story.
School reformers have been promising, for decades, that charters would boost test scores, cut costs, close achievement gaps and provide a specialized leg-up for racial minorities, disabled kids, and problem students of many stripes.
None of it was true. Charters never came close to living up to the hype. After several years of experimentation and the expenditure of billions of dollars, charter schools and their teachers proved, on the whole, to be no more effective than traditional schools. In many cases, the charters produced worse outcomes. And the levels of racial segregation and isolation in charter schools were often scandalous. While originally conceived as a way for teachers to seek new ways to reach the kids who were having the most difficult time, the charter school system instead ended up leaving behind the most disadvantaged youngsters.
In her book
Reign of Error, Diane Ravitch explains the problem:
Many studies show that charters enroll a disproportionately small share of students who are English-language learners or who have disabilities, as compared with their home district. A survey of expulsion rates in the District of Columbia found that the charters—which enroll nearly half the student population of the district—expel large numbers of children; the charters’ expulsion rate is seventy-two times the expulsion rate in the public schools. … As the charters shun these students, the local district gets a disproportionately large number of the students who are most expensive and most challenging to educate; when public students leave for charters, the budget of the public schools shrinks, leaving them less able to provide a quality education to the vast majority of students.
That is not to say that all charter schools are an unmitigated mess, some of them are great. Just like some public schools are great. But, overall, it's hard to say that charter schools' records justify turning ever more school districts upside down to install them.
Cyber schools have an even more dreadful record. As author Bob Herbert has reported:
Even fewer knew how poorly virtual schools performed. The National Education Policy Center at the University of Colorado did extensive research on the academic outcomes of primary and secondary cyberschools, with a particular focus on K12, the largest and most aggressive outfit in the field. The results were grim. Math and reading scores were poor. Attrition rates were high and graduation rates were abysmally low. When the center looked at virtual schools in Colorado, it found that “half the online students wound up leaving within a year, and when they returned [to their traditional schools] they were often further behind academically than when they started.”
Though cyberschools received large amounts of public money, there was no way for outsiders to know what cyberpupils were really doing in the privacy of their homes, often with minimal, or no, adult oversight. The teachers were in remote locations, usually their own homes, sometimes hundreds of miles away. They were less well paid than traditional classroom teachers and were typically saddled with sky-high student-teacher ratios. The potential for a wide variety of abuses, including cheating, was enormous. And, of course, the socialization process that is normally an integral part of actually attending school can be hampered.
Colorado has also had its problems with their cyber-school called
Colorado Virtual Academy.
According to prwatch.org:
Another former teacher from K12 Inc.'s Colorado Virtual Academy said, "Three-quarters of my credit recovery kids never logged in, never completed any work, never answered their emails or phone calls, yet they remained on my class rosters. I began wondering about the state-mandated hours for students at the high school level. No one is monitoring this as far as I can see."
In a few states, regulators are starting to catch on. According to the New York Times, a Colorado state audit found that K12 Inc.'s Colorado Virtual Academy received money for 120 students whose enrollment could not be verified. The state ordered the school to reimburse $800,000 dollars.
"The kids enroll, you get the money, the kids disappear," says Gary Miron of the National Education Policy Center (NEPC) and Western Michigan University told the Times.
Costs for online learning are much lower than traditional schools. Kids take lessons at home, so the virtual school operators have no classrooms to maintain or heating bills to pay. Teachers are paid less, and student-teacher ratios are massive. But some states pay cyber schools almost as much per child as brick-and-mortar schools -- that's $10,000 per student in Pennsylvania, double what it actually costs, says the state auditor.
But, despite the underwhelming report cards that alternative schools are receiving, not to mention the number that have already failed and closed, they are somehow
still taking America by storm.
A report from the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools . . . [the charters] which receive public taxpayer funding but are typically run by outside agencies like for-profit management companies, grew by an estimated 288,000 students nationwide, an increase of nearly 13 percent up to a total nationwide charter enrollment of more than 2.5 million students.
The overall number of actual charter schools operating grew by 436 nationwide with 642 new schools opening and 206 schools closing down.
That means that in 206 American communities, a school-full of young kids were taken out of their local school, transplanted into a charter school which, evidently didn't produce the target return on investment and ultimately closed. Whereupon, the charter school-full of kids were uprooted again and repotted in either their old public school or yet another charter school which may, or may not, live up to its business plan.
As a parent who was forced, by circumstance, to uproot my son several times during his K-12 years, this kind of movement rarely goes well.
Going back to my linguistic introduction, all of the foregoing describe the "salience" of the recent student protests in Colorado. They are not the first communities to protest against school reformers. Many communities have considered the reforms on offer and said "no thanks," some have tried them and reversed their decisions after a poor result.
Events in Jeffco and Dougco, Colorado have grabbed our national attention because more and more communities can relate to what is happening there. American parents are beginning to see that destabilizing their communities by siphoning off public funds to finance private enterprise schools, turning their school boards into armed political camps and disrupting their children's lives and education are not worth a "grass is greener" "choice" offered by a school dreamed up by a millionaire or a politician with a sudden interest in education.
Americans are already heavily invested in their public schools and, I believe, if the same amount of money that the so-called reform movement has mustered were lavished on our public schools, we could probably actually quickly solve any problems they currently have.
Bob Herbert put it very well, I think:
The amount of money in play is breathtaking. And the fiascos it has wrought put a spotlight on America’s class divide and the damage that members of the elite, with their money and their power and their often misguided but unshakable belief in their talents and their virtue, are inflicting on the less financially fortunate.
Those who are genuinely interested in improving the quality of education for all American youngsters are faced with two fundamental questions: First, how long can school systems continue to pursue market-based reforms that have failed year after demoralizing year to improve the education of the nation’s most disadvantaged children? And second, why should a small group of America’s richest individuals, families, and foundations be allowed to exercise such overwhelming—and often such toxic—influence over the ways in which public school students are taught?