Last week, nearly one thousand representatives from business groups, education departments, state legislatures, and free-market think tanks descended on San Francisco's Palace Hotel to strategize a revolution in American education. Focused on state-level politics and driven by marketing buzzwords like "blended learning" and "customized online instruction," it was not the kind of policy powwow that typically draws national media attention.
But education reform is a hot topic these days, and interest in the two-day "Excellence in Action" summit was further heightened by the controversial presence of the summit's keynote speaker: News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch, whose recent foray into for-profit education has focused a spotlight on an increasingly confident and ambitious movement to privatize and digitize American K-through-12.
The debate over the reforms endorsed at "Excellence in Action" has been steadily intensifying. Reform boosters -- a mix of (mostly) Republican state lawmakers, for-profit education companies and their lobbyists, and libertarian ideologues -- maintain that creating a competitive hi-tech education marketplace will make U.S. students more competitive internationally and close the much-lamented achievement gap. Critics suspect an agenda that has more to do with smashing teachers unions and turning tax dollars into profits. Since entering the education reform fray, Murdoch has become a vocal reform booster and unlikely spokesperson for "our children." As he has several times before, he used his time in San Francisco to
argue forcefully that what public education needs is a good dose of free-market innovation. "Put simply we must approach education the way Steve Jobs approached every industry he touched. To be willing to blow up what doesn't work or gets in the way."
Among those Murdoch and his fellow reformers seem to view as "getting in the way" are the majority of associations comprised of actual educators. More than one hundred of these teachers and their allies
protested Murdoch's presence with placards declaring, "Our Schools Are Not for Profit." Among the marchers was Matthew Hardy of the United Educators of San Francisco. "I think we should be very concerned that the folks inside this hotel are looking at our schools as untapped profit centers," he said. "Schools are there to educate kids, not make money for corporations. Murdoch and the rest of them aren't just going after teachers unions, but the idea of public schools in general."
Inside the conference hall, hecklers interrupted Murdoch's address as he took the podium. "Equality in education, not privatization!" one yelled. "Corporations own the media, why not education?" asked another before security escorted him out.
This question -- "Why not education?" -- is one Murdoch takes seriously. His answer, it seems:
Why not indeed? The mogul bluntly
explained his late interest in education while announcing News Corp.'s acquisition of the Brooklyn-based school-performance tracking firm Wireless Generation in November of 2010. "When it comes to K-through-12 education, we see a $500 billion sector in the U.S. alone that is waiting desperately to be transformed." Murdoch was only slightly more discreet the previous month during a speech in Washington D.C., when he couched his concern for Why Johnny Can't Read by waxing nostalgic about the American Dream as understood by the non-rich -- those Americans, including those protesting outside the Palace Hotel, who have begun to refer to themselves the "99 percent."
"Upward mobility in America is in jeopardy unless we fix our public schools," the billionaire
told the Washington D.C. audience shortly before the launch of News Corp.'s Education Division. The situation was so critical, Murdoch warned, "Our middle-class way of life may disappear."
Murdoch crafted his keynote message last week in similar terms of supremely enlightened self-interest, as if a spike in his own bottom line was just a happy byproduct of his crusade to save the middle-class. Even in his new incarnation as Concerned Citizen Kane, Murdoch had precious little use for sentimentality in San Francisco, and held no fear of sounding overly brash in discussing a field he knows almost nothing about.
"I'm speaking today as a businessman. So let me come right to the point," Murdoch said after the hecklers had been removed. "We need to tear down an education system designed for the 19th century -- and replace it with one suited for the 21st."
Murdoch argued that digitizing America's classrooms and viewing K-through-12 as a business marketplace will better serve underperforming students -- "the human toll of our complacency." It was left to others to spell out the other potential beneficiaries. According to summit participant and ex-D.C. mayor Adrian Fenty, a Democrat, following the "Roadmap for Reform" unveiled in San Francisco would result in "a huge flow of business to the private sector." But getting there, Fenty stressed, was a bipartisan effort, requiring Democrats to "get past the teachers unions."
For Murdoch, the prize sitting beyond the teachers unions resembles a glowing Apple display window more than a brick and mortar public school. In one of several references to Apple Inc. products in his keynote, Murdoch imagined American schools one day resembling Apple stores (which are publically traded and non-unionized) and compared contemporary public education to the Big Brother of George Orwell's 1984, as represented in Apple's iconic commercial that ran during the 1984 Superbowl.
"Let's be clear: Technology is never going to replace teachers," Murdoch stated in response to a recent New York Times article that threw some cold water on the promises of digital education. But Murdoch's reassurance didn't jibe with the views of other influential speakers at the conference. "We're too labor intensive, we have more teachers than agriculture workers," huffed James Guthrie of the George W. Bush Institute. Guthrie argued that sweeping education reform would add "trillions to the economy" and future federal budgets, which would ultimately translate into money for "the people." But a return to fiscal health won't mean hiring more teachers. "We need to inject technology forcefully into the equation," he stressed.
It is revealing that the financial crisis that has hit the middle class so hard was heartily welcomed in San Francisco, Murdoch's newfound concern for the institutions of middle-class upward mobility notwithstanding. A major theme of the conference was summed up in a strategy session entitled "Don't Let a Financial Crisis Go To Waste." Speakers urged lawmakers to seize the moment to push through reforms and defenestrate their best-organized critics -- the teachers unions. "The budget cuts are the best thing that ever happened to us and are [allowing us to] structurally change public education," said a Republican policymaker from Indiana. "We've limited collective bargaining rights of teachers to wages and cut out the garbage."
Hanna Skandera, New Mexico Secretary-Designate for Public Education and former CEO of Laying the Foundation, said that a 25 percent cut to education budgets was an opportunity to for districts to get a better "return on investment" with their education dollars. Florida State Senator Don Gaetz argued that by turning "schools into businesses" and augmenting personal instruction with digital programs, districts could save as much as $2,000 per student while improving "outcomes." (Stephanie Mencimer of
Mother Jones recently
examined these outcomes and found the early results inconsistent with the reform hype.)
In line with the anti-union animus of Murdoch's media outlets, organized labor was the villain at the summit he headlined. By the last panel on the schedule, Democratic Los Angeles Mayor Antonio R. Villaraigosa felt the need to sheepishly preface a comment by saying, "I'm going to be controversial, but I'm pro-union." Chris Cerf, the New Jersey Commissioner of Education and former CEO of Sangari Global Education, expressed the more common view that political combat with unions was a blood sport vital to the success of the movement. "I'm so glad to be talking to legislators," he said. "This is 100 percent about political courage -- a knife fight in a dark room."
If they win their knife fight, the model Murdoch and his education reform allies have in mind is not the best of the state university systems of the past -- affordable, well funded, a symbol of the great middle-class expansion of the twentieth-century -- but rather the scandal-plagued for-profit online education industry of the twenty-first. Not the University of California at Berkeley, but the University of Phoenix. The "Roadmap to Reform" unveiled by summit chair Jeb Bush offered state lawmakers a blueprint for enlarging the space for remote
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