By John Thompson.
Diane Ravitch observes that “reformers almost always have a soft landing in a cushy job, even when their previous endeavor was a dud.” Chris Barbic failed in leading the Achievement School District in Tennessee but, “No matter. Barbic now works for the John Arnold Foundation in what must be a less stressful job.” Then, “John King was a disaster as state commissioner in New York. Now he is Secretary of Education.” Arne Duncan now works for Laurene Powell Jobs, Steve Jobs’ widow. And, she adds, “one of his top deputies, James Shelton, was just hired as advisor to Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan. Shelton previously worked for the Gates Foundation. Life is good if you are a reformer.”
Corporate school reform famously adopted the venture capitalists’ tactic of “convergence.” Edu-philanthropists gambled on test-driven accountability, charters, and “disruptive innovation” in order to produce “transformative” change. The plan was for all reformers to sing from the same hymnal, all pushing the same test, sort, reward, and punish regime. If it failed, they planned to reconsider their bets, and like good entrepreneurs, they would try new experiments.
The annual April Opt Out once again brought news of the angry backlash by educators, parents, and students against the test-driven, competition-driven mandates of the last generation. The month also brought new evidence from the reliable NAEP assessments that all those tens of billions of dollars in bubble-in and charter-driven reforms have driven student performance down. So, why won’t accountability-driven reformers hold themselves accountable?
Perhaps the best answer to the question of why reformers and their funders refuse to learn from their mistakes comes from Thomas Frank’s Listen, Liberal or Whatever Happened to the Party of the People?. Republicans represent the One Percent, Frank says, but Democrats owe their allegiance to the Ten Percent, the top professionals who dominated both the Clinton and Obama administrations. Moreover, these professionals are autonomous, they listen to one another but not to voices from the working people below them.
President Bill Clinton started us down the road with a “tight little group of credentialed professionals who dominated his administration.” Obama quickly gave into pressure by venture philanthropists to disavow his promise to assemble a “team of rivals.” Instead, he staffed the Education Department with Gates Foundation staffers and likeminded corporate reformers. Frank borrows the words of David Brooks who praised Obama for the way he appointed a “valedictocracy.”
Frank further explains that “Team Obama joined the fight against teachers unions from day one.” Part of the reason was that he surrounded himself with people whose faith lies in “‘cream rising to the top’ (to repeat [Jonathan] Alter’s take on Obama’s credo)” and “tend to disdain those at the bottom.” And that is the first step towards understanding how Obama’s “best and brightest” were different than Franklin Roosevelt’s Brain Trust. Roosevelt advisors were smart and they had had a variety of real world experiences. FDR’s Brain Trust would try something else when their original policies failed, but Obama’s team was full of “professional correctness.” It “had successfully internalized mainstream thinking in their respective disciplines.”
Frank cites Obama’s most arrogant advisors, ranging from Rahm Emanuel to Larry Summers. Summers told Ron Suskind that one reason why inequality has gone up is that “people are being treated closer to the way that they’re supposed to be.” This prompted Frank’s commentary, “Remember, as you let that last sentence slide slowly down your throat, that is a Democrat saying this.”
Then Frank addresses an even bigger set of failures and another reason why school reformers, like so many other neo-liberals, can’t admit defeat and say they are sorry. These Democrats have produced “a failure for both the nation and for their own partisan health.” They indulged themselves in a “flattery so sweet it bordered on idolatry.” They “combine self-righteousness and class privilege in a way that Americans find stomach-turning.” Winning elections should be the advisors’ “most fundamental act, [but it] takes a back seat to professional vanity.”
So, the failure of accountability-driven school reformers to hold themselves accountable is just one part of the story Frank tells where “Nothing is more characteristic of the liberal class than its members’ sense of their own elevated goodness.” It’s not just their “shrill self-righteousness that conservatives love to deplore.” It’s their “polished informality,” a rarefied “combination of virtue and pedigree … of taste, of status … of professionalism.” And, that brings us to the question that I have been afraid to answer, as well as Diane Ravitch’s question: Why would we teachers expect to be treated with any more respect by the Ten Percent than we and other workers are treated by the One Percent?
What do you think? Why aren’t accountability-driven reformers held accountable? Do you agree with Frank’s diagnosis? Have the Ten Percent who run so many Democratic administrations done as much harm to education as the One Percent?
stock73
The eight years of the Obama Administration have damaged public education principally because there was no plan — like most the Obama Administration’s efforts in other areas — for a public policy outcome, there was only a means to an unarticulated end or ends. And so it has gone since the federal Department of Education began denigrating the educational system in America shortly after it was founded. It’s time to close the Dept. of Education, and return education to the people — the states.
Wilma de Soto
It’s the neo-liberal mindset rather than traditional liberal that rules today. Neo-liberals worship the so-called, “Free Market”, and cornering the multi-billion dollar institution of education was first and foremost in their minds and not the education of the poor, working-class, or even middle-classes.
Traditional Yankee Puritan-type aristocracy had a better sense of noblesse obligè, and used their wealth and influence to establish universities, hospitals, institutions of the Arts and Humanities as opposed to the Southern aristocracy who built showcase houses, held grand parties, and were more concerned with societal hierarchies and were less concerned with educating the masses. The Yankee Puritan type aristocracy held the Southern type of aristocracy at bay for a very long time.
Somewhere between Clinton and Bush, the more traditional southern aristocratic mindset took hold. Hence, the comment about inequality that, “people treated closer to the way that they’re supposed to be.”
2old2tch
Whoa! You are far too kind to Yankee Puritan stock (from which I come.) Larry Summers while Jewish was born and raised in the heart of “Yankeeism.” The “best and the brightest” all hail from Haavaad and its lesser brethren which while not evil have probably spawned the worst of the neoliberals (with a little help from a Chicago contingent). While there may be little harm in these creatures as individuals, they seem to form a self congratulatory fraternity which looks on lesser humans condescendingly if not disdainfully. It is a shame that they are so afraid of recognizing that all great ideas do not originate in their tight little circle. Unfortunately, I don’t think we can wait for their own hubris to cause their destruction. If nothing else, perhaps their overreach has led to a resurgence of progressivism and finally ended our complacency. It is time for people to realize that democracy is not a state of being but an active process that must involve us all if it is to be sustained.