By Anthony Cody.

I was recently invited to speak at a conference in another state. Since I could not make it there in person, I recorded my thoughts on this video.

Here is the text of my remarks:

Privateers and Profiteers: How and Why are they Undermining Public Education?

As we near the end of the Obama administration, it is a good time to take a closer look at what has happened to public education over the past seven years.

Some very powerful people have used money and the political influence that money buys to undermine and set the stage for the elimination of public education as we have known it for the past 100 years.

To be sure public education has always been flawed, but there was an aspiration in what the Washington state supreme court recently called “common schools,” that we should have schools funded and governed by citizens, that serve all members of our communities. That social compact is in the process of being ripped up by people who believe that in the absence of a profit motive, public institutions are incapable of innovation.

How is this being done?

There are two major thrusts under way. The first project is to transfer tax dollars out of public schools and into private schools, parochial schools and semi-private charters. Organizations like the Gates, Walton and Broad Foundations have promoted charter schools as the way to “break the public school monopoly.” Charter schools will insist they are public, but any time there is a legal conflict, they will state over and over again that they are private entities. In California, charter operators go to their authorizing public agency only once every several years for a perfunctory renewal. Only in cases of gross malfeasance is a charter ever revoked. Other than this, public oversight is nil, which is one reason a recent report found that nearly $4 billion in federal funds have disappeared into a “black hole” of fraudulent charter schools – some of which took millions of dollars and never even opened their doors. And these schools divert scarce public funding, while rejecting students that are disabled, or with behavior issues. A New York charter school was recently found to have a list of 16 students tagged “Got to Go.” These students were pressured to leave the school.

The second major effort is to revolutionize education through technology. Some of the same philanthropies are engaged in this effort as well. The idea is that we could save a lot of money if the latest educational technology were deployed in our classrooms. We could have students learn from computerized educational games, or videotaped lessons. Class sizes could increase to 150 and low paid technicians could work alongside one or two teachers to monitor students and make sure they were on task. This is the Rocketship charter school model, and it hasn’t worked so far in its most pure trial.

This vision has driven the Common Core standards, sponsored by the Gates Foundation, and embraced and promoted by the Department of Education, which invested $330 million to develop tests aligned to the standards. A large motivator for these standards was the creation of a uniform market for technology products. Bill Gates compares classrooms to electric sockets, and points out how a standard socket design allows appliance makers to innovate and create all sorts of devices that can be plugged into those sockets. In this analogy, our curriculum ought to be standardized, and of course then we have standardized tests to see the results. Then we can compare one educational product to another, one computer game to another, one teacher to another, all based on these test scores.

To be clear, I do not think all the people promoting these things are nefarious greedy moneygrubbers. I think most of them genuinely believe these solutions will help teachers and students. But there are some core elements of faith driving these visions.

The first element of faith is that in the absence of a drive for profits, education will remain stagnant. I was in the classroom for 18 years, and my colleagues and I were constantly innovating. That sometimes involved technology, like when I started an all-girl tech class that met before the regular school day began. But often it was innovative ways to collaborate, to observe one another and learn together. We benefited from some grant money, but this did not cost much. We were not in it for the money. We were trying to get better as teachers, trying to serve our students better. Because we felt empowered, we owned our teaching, we took responsibility for it.

Schools are capable of wonderfully effective innovations. Look at the Performance Standards Consortium schools in New York, which have significantly higher graduation rates than the city average, especially for English Learners. I visited there last February, and saw 500 teachers gathered together for workshops led by their peers, on all sorts of instructional and educational topics. The staff at these schools decides what students need to learn, and the students put together extensive portfolios, which they must defend.

This is the most rigorous process you could design. It is individualized, not standardized. It allows for excellence to emerge. It does not require everyone and everything in the system to be standardized for the convenience of “innovators” working outside of the school.

The second article of faith is that new technologies are capable of transforming schools, and making them far more efficient. Learning occurs in the context of human relationships, and the relationship that a teacher has with her students is a hugely powerful lever for learning. That relationship is undermined when we begin evaluating teachers based on test scores, and when we micromanage teachers, pressuring them to teach to the tests.

Charter schools have not been shown to offer any significant academic advantages to the students who attend them, and they exact a huge cost from their communities.

Educational technologies are not worthless, but we should not be forced to standardize instruction and assessment in order to support their expansion.

So for the past decade, we have seen reforms driven by this vision of making education more efficient, more profitable, and more technologically advanced.

You might have read a book a few years ago written by Daniel Pink, called “Drive, the surprising truth about what motivates us.” In it, Pink showed a great deal of evidence that we are motivated by three major intrinsic drives. First, autonomy. We are at our most creative when we are responsible for our work. The second major motivator is mastery. We want to get better at what we do. We do not need to be forced to do this by threats of a lousy evaluation, or that we might be fired. We WANT to get better! And lastly – and this applies to educators most of all – purpose. We have a strong sense of purpose that drew us to this profession, and that enlivens our work every day.

This understanding explains why many of the carrot and stick elements of corporate reform project simply are not working.

What would education reforms look like with a more humanistic vision? We need reforms that take build on these intrinsic motivators, for both students and teachers.

We should see class sizes shrink, because this allows teachers to provide more individual attention to students. Especially in high poverty schools, we should have classes of below twenty. This will allow teachers to feel they are serving their higher purpose, really reaching their students. It also provides time for teachers to do the sort of formative assessment with meaningful feedback for students – a strong promoter of growth.

We should give teachers time to collaborate, and they should own this professional work. They should have the latitude to choose avenues for their own growth, because this autonomy is a huge source of motivation.

We should ask communities to reinvest in their schools, with their tax dollars and with their children. When all of us send our children to common schools, we can begin to live by the golden rule that much better.

We should give students autonomy too – and a sense of purpose for their education that goes beyond the next high stakes tests. That means project based learning, and connections to real issues in their lives and in their communities.

We must reverse the past decade’s trend of increased racial and economic segregation. Charter schools have made this worse, but this issue affects public schools as well. The greatest progress we made in education was in the 70s and 80s, when desegregation was under way.

Parents and guardians are a huge asset to our schools, and we should find ways to have them involved in helping make decisions, and in connecting school to our students’ lives.

Our schools are porous, and closely connected to the social and economic health of our communities. We cannot pretend that schools can address these problems alone. Nor can we pretend that a college education is a sure ticket to the middle class. We need increased social services for students, and we need real economic opportunities in communities that have been all but abandoned.

Education is the most human of endeavors, and the promise of innovation in our schools has always been in the creative spirits of teachers and students. There may not be a lot of money to be made for investors, but it is time for educators, parents and students to be put back in charge of our schools.