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By John Thompson.

Part One of Two. Read Part Two here.

The theme of the Network for Public Education’s fifth annual conference was that corporate reformers have lost the “David versus Goliath” battle over public education. We public school supporters have defeated the privatization campaign known as corporate school reform. Goliath must know that his mega-bucks haven’t improved student performance but he keeps dumping backpacks full of cash into chosen schools. Hubris can explain some, but not all, of the continued subsidies that keep corporate school reform from collapsing.

As Diane Ravitch explains, Goliath claimed to be “the savior of poor black and brown children ‘trapped in failing schools.’” And for years, Goliath had used that propaganda meme while winning political battle after political battle. A mighty coalition, which had been built on the infrastructure laid by ALEC, the Koch brothers, and other anti-government interest groups, was able to unite neoliberals, edu-philanthropists, and the Obama administration in an effort to blow up neighborhood public schools.

Even as the political Goliath was defeating enemies, he failed completely in terms of real world education practice. Goliath tried charters, vouchers, testing, union-busting, and “value-added” evaluations to undermine the professional autonomy of teachers, and more. In my experience, however, their expensive mandates took low-performing inner city schools and made them much worse, as they also damaged schools that had previously been successful. Although I continually communicate with all types of people, it’s been years since I have talked with someone in the classroom who denies that corporate school reform, at best, created a mess.

Ravitch explains how “Goliath has run out of promises. He is now revealed as the ugly face of a lot of billionaires who don’t want to pay to educate children.” The only goal he met was to cut spending on education and lower taxes, and the public “eventually realized that Goliath pulled a trick on him.” So, “there is no ‘reform movement.’” The Billionaires Boys Club continues to fight for unchallengable power.

Goliath’s promises have been discredited. But his minions continue on, “like zombies, because the money is good.” Often, their followers don’t see any choice but to stick with Goliath’s army; after all, the traditional education system (and sometimes education journalism) has been bulldozed, meaning that the only professional ladder, if they want an education career, is funded by the Gates, Broad, Walton, Arnold, and other foundations.

It’s long been hard for me to face the facts documented at the NPE conference. I was slow to adopt Ravitch’s terminology. Against a growing body of evidence, I recoiled against the use of words like “privatize” and “corporate reform.” As late as 2014, when attending the first NPE conference in Austin, I hoped that reformers would acknowledge the seemingly obvious conclusion – their mandates had been implemented and they demonstrably failed. Reformers could continue to drive wedges between progressives, Democrats, civil rights activists, and education advocates, risking the election of anti-education, anti-public sector zealots. But they couldn’t undo the harm reform has done to students without asking the policy questions they should have asked before imposing a risky experiment on children.

Surely, when corporate reformers learned the hard truths about the way that they were turning 21st century schools into sped up versions of the Model T assembly line, they would back off from a social engineering a system which guarantees increased drill and kill malpractice.

When Donald Trump was elected, I regained some hope that neoliberal reformers would break ranks, and reject both the Betsy DeVos agenda and Trump’s demagoguery. In retrospect, I was naïve. Even as the reformers’ political machine stalled, they emulated the tactics of Mitch McConnell who collaborates with Trump in order to advance their political and economic agenda. As was often explained at the NPE, DeVos took the mask off of Goliath, revealing ALEC and the Koch brothers.

I’m sure there are lower- and intermediate-level staff who have committed to accountability-driven, competition-driven school reform, and who are still wrestling with the painful dilemmas of Trumpism. Many are too young to have seen inner city schools that weren’t dominated by teach to the test. However, I can no longer understand how they could claim that Goliath could somehow find a way to improve schooling. Instead, I ask why I was slow to face the full truths that were again documented by NPE members. So, this is a first of two posts and this one asks: How Was I wrong? Let Me Count Some Ways.

The Texas Observer’s Patrick Michels reported that the time and place of the 2014 NPE conference was not a coincidence. It preceded the South by Southwest education conference by one week. The NPE was countering the “better outfitted” reformers, “the tech and data evangelists who imagine a reinvented school experience with computer games, tablets and other innovative models, [who] gathered for the fourth year of the SXSWedu conference.”

Michels linked to reporting on the 2012 SXSWedu conference which was held at a time when corporate reform’s educational failures were well-documented but when it’s political unraveling was just beginning. Abby Rappaport wrote in The American Prospect that attendees would “would often allude to the trouble” created by making teachers labor under strict expectations of quantifiable performance, but “the conference also showed just how easy it is to talk around the fundamental points of contention in education policy.”

Rappaport summarized the conference’s main themes:

Technology is great, but teacher morale is low, and funding is getting cut right and left. Many in education fear that private companies will argue that technology saves costs—by reducing the need for teachers. Virtual schools and for-profit charters are creating firestorms in states across the country. SXSWedu offered a great showcase of some of the cool tech tools making their way into classrooms, but little was said about the fundamental disagreements over just how the classroom would look.

Two years later, as the first NPE was followed by the SXSWedu “playground,” Michels wrote that festival programmers implicitly acknowledged some defeats and “softened that contrast a little this year.” They included some talks on equity and community building, and allowed “a presentation by… Diane Ravitch.” Michels wrote:

On Monday afternoon, Ravitch took the stage in one of the festival’s many rooms, before a crowd almost as big as the one she addressed the day before at NPE. She lambasted “$1,500 conferences where you can cash in on education,” and warned about fetishizing games, apps and online learning. “[They] will harm children, they will destroy the teaching profession,” she said. The targets of her remarks were probably ensconced in another ballroom for a workshop on startup funding, but it was a significant statement with the big orange SXSWedu banner behind her.

A few minutes after Ravitch left the stage, it was occupied by a conversation on “Analytics and Student Success.”

In retrospect,  both NPE’s research on the flaws of data-driven privatized schools, as well as the journalists’ coverage of the SXSWedu, are remarkably prescient. Since the Data Analytica revelations and scandals that accompanied the election of Trump, even congenital optimists like me have had to acknowledge the dangers of monetizing data.

Before the coverage of the Facebook scandals that helped the Russans help put Trump in the White House, I didn’t have the expertise to evaluate such research and draw conclusions. Being Old School, I didn’t reach conclusions before studying the top journalism and social science of recent years. And since my understanding of the earlier NPE conference was enhanced by Austin writers, I started my evaluation of the Indianapolis NPE forum by googling Chalkbeat Indiana.

Knowing that Indianapolis is at the heart of the dying, but still dangerous corporate reform movement, I expected that Chalkbeat would choose its words carefully and make sure that its reporting didn’t threaten its donations from Goliath. Chalkbeat Indianapolis didn’t cover the NPE conference but Matt Barnum of Chalkbeat New York has been covering Indiana’s Mind Trust and its successor, the City Fund. (Chalkbeat Indiana has since linked to WFYI Indianapolis’s report on one of the city’s 20 “innovation schools” which is receiving $1.3 million in management fees.)

This leads to the biggest question that I brought to the NPE. We Oklahomans have failed to communicate with our state’s edu-philanthropists on how their science-based, holistic early education and trauma-informed instruction programs and the Indianapolis Goliath are inherently incompatible.  We know that the City Fund  seems to have its eye on Deborah Gist’s Tulsa Public schools.  We could use some help from NPE conference participants in explaining to Tulsa philanthropists why their “portfolio model” is likely to undermine their contributions to high quality pre-k, just like it did in New Orleans.

As a lobbyist for Planned Parenthood and a board member for the ACLU/OK, I developed great respect for the Kaiser and Schusterman foundations and other Tulsa philanthropists. I still struggle to understand how those leaders could not see how their humane, evidence-based programs are threatened by Goliath’s data-driven, reward and punish corporate reforms. But one of the first people I saw in Indianapolis was Tom Ultican, and he gave me information on the $200,000 Schusterman donated to California privatizers such as Antonio Villaraigosa and Marshall Tuck. If nothing else, I would like to explain to the philanthropists why educators can’t lower our guard and stop defending ourselves against their scorched earth tactics. I’d appreciate any help the NPE can provide in explaining why we will fight Goliath to the end.

What do you think? Even though Goliath is dead in terms of the potential to improve schools, how dangerous is he? What about the similarities between his monetizing data and recent events, where digital media, ranging from Cambridge Analytica role in the 2016 election to Facebook’s footprint on culture, played destructive roles in recent years?  

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Anthony Cody

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