Read it at TruthOut
Speech by Kenneth J. Saltman at Occupy Chicago, Friday, November 18, 2011, adapted from his forthcoming book "The Failure of Corporate School Reform" (Paradigm Publishers 2012)
The Failure of Corporate School Reform: Toward a New Common School Movement
Monday 5 December 2011
by Kenneth J. Saltman, Truthout | Op-Ed
While this movement began on the political right, the corporate school model has been heralded across the political spectrum and is aggressively embraced by both major parties. Corporate school reformers champion private-sector approaches to reform including, especially, privatization, deregulation and the importation of terms and assumptions from business, while they imagine public schools as private businesses, districts as markets, students as consumers and knowledge as product. Corporate school reform aims to transform public schooling into a private industry nationally by replacing public schools with privately managed charter schools, voucher schemes and tax credit scholarships for private schooling. The massive expansion of deunionized, nonprofit, privately managed charter schools with short-term contracts is an intermediary step toward the declaration of their failure and replacement by the for-profit industry in Educational Management Organizations (EMOs).
EMOs extract profit by cutting teacher pay and educational resources while relying on high teacher turnover and labor precarity.(i) Corporate school reform seeks solutions to public problems in private-sector ways, from contracting out schools and services, to union-busting, a wholesale embrace of numerical benchmarking and database tracking and the modeling of schooling and administration on multiple aspects of corporate culture. Policy hawks make demands, for example, for teacher entrepreneurialism, or insist that students dress like retail chain workers and call school heads "CEO"; or install corporate models of numerical "accountability," paying students for grades and teachers for test scores; or leaders play intricate Wall Street-style shell games with test performance to show rising "return on investment"; or teachers assign students the task of crafting a resume for Benjamin Franklin; BP was involved in creating California's new science curriculum: the examples are endless.
Despite the fact that corporate school reforms have expanded at an exponential speed, the dominant corporate school reforms have failed on their own terms.
3 comments:
I don't think the evidence against charters and other reforms are as definitive as he's making it out to be. But isn't the point you made in the other thread about finding a balance between local, state, and federal politics apt here?
With regard to disparities in funding, I'd say it has to do with the fact funding is very reliant on local funding. Further, given state's have more leeway on the distribution of funds, some are bound to be more generous (like New Jeresy and Massachusetts) and others less (like NY and California) - note this could be do to a range of factors though like population demographics, rural areas, size, etc.
Hey Dan, most of the studies I've seen (I'm far from an expert here) reflect, at best, no difference between charter and TPS. And, according to Stanford's CREDO Institute (proponents of the charter system, themselves), charter schools produce worse outcomes that are statistically significant. Link: http://credo.stanford.edu/reports/MULTIPLE_CHOICE_CREDO.pdf
The disparities in educational funding follow rather closely the disparities in community affluence. Even in somewhat affluent states.
That is what I've seen too - that on net there isn't much of a difference. But that's the whole point - it works sometimes and doesn't other times. It is dependent on the area, available resources, funding options, qualitty of public education, etc. But the larger point I tried to empjhasize is that education is a hard subject I to generalize especially in the US, because so much is handled at the state/local level. It is like when people argue test scores have flatlined while funding has increased at the federal level - that is true, but the funding could be beneficial in other ways like increased transparency, improving access, maintaining teacher pay to keep up with standard of living, etc. But there is also a lot of room for waste because oversight is difficult (but that is a whole seperate issue).
Your last point is also absolutely correct - that is because education relies heavily on local funding.
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