By John Thompson.

The most serious criticism of my book, A Teacher’s Tale, is that it focuses on the harm done by No Child Left Behind and underemphasizes the threat of corporate school reform.  During my fulltime teaching career, however, I saw just one overt example of national reformers trying to impose their will on the Oklahoma City Public Schools (OKCPS); a rookie superintendent from the Broad Academy came and left after a six month “reign of error.” On the contrary, in the wake of the Murrah Building terrorism, I saw Oklahoma City pull together and engage in a collaborative, bipartisan school improvement effort.

It wasn’t until I left the fulltime classroom in 2010 that I saw out-of-state corporate reformers, ranging from the Walton Foundation and the Parent Revolution to ALEC, try to bring their competition-driven, edu-politics to Oklahoma City. I saw plenty of examples of Sooner state Reaganism, and the gutting of the social safety net. After all, we expect businessmen to play political hardball, as well as take risks and leverage capital in order to increase their profits. That is why we need the checks and balances of our democratic system to counter the “creative destruction” of capitalism. Some free market experiments will fail, but “its only money.” When schools gamble on market-driven policies, however, the losers are children.

Actually, even the economic game involves more than money, as we in Oklahoma have learned after our state adopted so much of the ALEC agenda of shrinking the size of government. Even as we cut funding by about 1/4th since 2008, national corporate reformers have imposed incredibly expensive and untested policies (such as Common Core testing and test-driven teacher evaluations), while encouraging the creaming of the easiest-to-educate (and the least-expensive-to-educate) students from neighborhood schools and into charter schools.

Before 2010, I only read about national conservative and neo-liberal school reformers who adopted a strategy of “convergence” or “flooding the zone” to drive rapid, “transformational change” in selected districts and schools. I didn’t personally witness the way that they used mass charterization, now called the “portfolio strategy,” to avoid the messiness of constitutional democracy. Freed of local governance, corporate reformers promoted a school culture of risk-taking, and urgent experimentation to produce “disruptive innovation.”

Now, it looks like local edu-philanthropists have joined with the Billionaires Boys Club and they may be ready to pull the plug on the OKCPS. Before embracing the policies pushed by national reformers, Oklahoma City and other urban areas should consider Sarah Reckhow’s and Megan Tompkins-Stange’s “‘Singing from the Same Hymnbook’: Education Policy Advocacy at Gates and Broad.” It begins in the glory days of test-driven, market-driven reform, from 2008 to 2010, when the Broad Foundation proclaimed,

We feel the stars have finally aligned. With an agenda that echoes our decade of investments—charter schools, performance pay for teachers, accountability, expanded learning time and national standards—the Obama administration is poised to cultivate and bring to fruition the seeds we and other reformers have planted.

Reckhow and Tompkins-Stange explain how this dramatic change was conducted in the “absence of a robust public debate.” An alphabet soup of think tanks, funded by “venture philanthropists, produced the best public relations campaign that money could buy, and they did so while playing fast and loose with the evidence. As a Gates insider explained:

It’s within [a] sort of fairly narrow orbit that you manufacture the [research] reports. You hire somebody to write a report. There’s going to be a commission, there’s going to be a lot of research, there’s going to be a lot of vetting and so forth and so on, but you pretty much know what the report is going to say before you go through the exercise.

It should now be clear that corporate reform failed. The ostensible leader of the campaign, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is gone, as are the highest-profile leaders of transformational reforms in New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Newark, Houston, Memphis, Washington D.C. and other districts. The quantitative portions of teacher evaluations are all but dead, and Common Core has replaced NCLB as the most toxic brand in education. After the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) replaced NCLB, and after Hillary Clinton distanced herself from charter schools, it is likely that federal support for this top-down social engineering experiment is history.

The prospect of the eminent demise of test-driven, competition-driven reform seems to have prompted the most fervent reformers in the Broad and Walton Foundations to double down on mass charterization, i.e. the “portfolio” model,  in Los Angeles, Oakland, Chicago, Newark, D.C. and, apparently, Oklahoma City. I believe it is also obvious why top-down, corporate reform failed. It came with the sword, dismissing educators as the enemy. The “Billionaires Boys Club” hatched their secret plans without submitting them to the clash of ideas. These non-educators ignored both social science and the hard-earned wisdom of practitioners. The “astroturf” think tank, the Center for Reinventing Public Education (CRPE), has gained a foothold in Tulsa and they seem to have the ears of competition-driven reformers in Oklahoma City. The CRPE may best illustrate the way that reformers are doubling down on the edu-politics of destruction, even while they belatedly try to cultivate a kinder, gentler image. The CRPE recently articulated its original theory of school reform, which:

…likens politics to a fight between two men in a street. If nobody intervenes, the stronger will win. … The ultimate result depends less on the strength of the original fighters than on the behavior of the crowd. … One former bystander might enter because he thinks a combatant is fighting dirty and wants to defend the principle of fair play, another because he identifies with the race or religion of one of the combatants, another because he hopes to make off with one fighter’s watch, another because a fighter promises to share the contents of his opponent’s wallet with anyone who will join him, and so on.

The CRPE says that the outcomes produced by this theory, “coupled with the experiences of prominent education reform leaders in a variety of cities, leaves us with six lessons.” They begin with #1:

Elite support alone is not enough, and they end with #6 Even when they are no longer dominant, groups that oppose reform won’t give up. Reformers must anticipate many cycles of conflict, not just one decisive fight.

So, before local school districts flirt with the mass charterization of schools, or the “portfolio” tactic, they should consider the current message of the CRPE:

Reformers need to expect political struggle and coalition-building to go on indefinitely. In the reform of big city schools, politics is a permanent reality, not a problem to be dispatched once and for all via the shock and awe of state takeover, outside money, and talent. The same, of course, is also true of the portfolio strategy itself—a never-ending process of assessment, needs identification, new school development, and abandonment of failures. Reformers must master politics or be overcome by them.

Or, to put it in concrete terms, schools in my Oklahoma City, as well as districts across the nation, have been battered by a dozen years of lavishly-funded reforms based on test, sort, reward, and punish. We educators are exhausted and the patrons’ patience is gone. Budgets are being slashed. And, instead of seeking win-win ways to fight the education legacies of poverty, reformers are promising even fiercer and never-ending waves of school wars.

Now, corporate reformers are trying to impose their edu-politics of destruction on Oklahoma City. They have submitted a gentrification plan that they spin as an education plan. This KFOR news report shows the feelings, including anger and fear, that are being expressed in community meetings in response to the charter plan. It also provides a rare opportunity to see me when I’m speechless.   

It clearly is the first major, local assault on the teachers union (following a number of statewide attacks on collective bargaining.) Almost certainly, the new mass charterization plan is the first effort to create a charter portfolio, and it is unlikely to be the last. As CRPE says, corporate reformers in Oklahoma City are joining with their allies across the nation and launching the first of “many cycles of conflict, not just one decisive fight.”

What do you think? Corporate school reformers were once open about their belief that public education was hopelessly broken, and that the entire system needed to be blown up.  Are the “portfolio” models prompted by the CRPE, the Broad and Walton foundations, and others any kinder and gentler?