Education "Reform": The Wrong Conversation
Jennifer "Edushyster" Berkshire has been having a series of conversations with some of the titans of reforminess. As Peter Greene notes, Jennifer is just about the most charming (and consequently disarming) person you'd ever care to meet; it's not a surprise, then, that she's been able to rope in some of the biggest names in education "reform" for her blog posts.
Her latest sit-down is with one of the better-knowns of a new breed of "reasonable" reformer: Peter Cunningham, creator of Education Post. I'll confess I haven't followed Cunningham's site religiously, but near as I can tell he's running a farm system, bringing up a bunch of hot prospects to push back on folks like Jennifer and Peter and me and others who don't buy into the reformy argument.
Except that pushing back isn't the ultimate goal; instead, apparently, we're supposed to lay aside our policy differences on tenure and testing and charter schools, all for the sake of kids. Because, in the "reasonable" reformer's mind, there's just oodles of stuff we can all agree on.
Take, for example, school funding. As Cunningham himself has recently said:
Now that is a very interesting framework; it deserves some unpacking.Instead of a tiresome debate around accountability, we agree on simple measures of progress and shared responsibility among teachers, principals, superintendents and taxpayers.The only way to achieve this vision in a decentralized system like ours is with a much bigger federal investment. Today, 1-2 percent of the federal budget goes to K-12 education, while 16-20 percent goes to defense, when you include the wars. But education is the real defense industry of the 21st Century so let’s talk about shifting a few percentage points from unwinnable wars and unneeded weapons programs toward public education.Conservatives will insist we also talk about entitlement reforms that could shift dollars from the elderly to the young. We should all welcome that conversation, including those of us who no longer have kids in school and are busy tracking our retirement portfolios. Our collective interest trumps our self-interest.
What Cunningham is engaging in here is an argument I called Jonathan Alter out on years ago. Alter coined this position the "Grand Bargain": teachers would have to be held accountable in a system that he didn't care to define specifically; in return they would get "a lot more pay."
As I said at the time, the details in these grand bargains are never fully spelled out -- yet we teachers are expected to agree to them, like saps at the worst used car dealer you could imagine. Ask the teachers in Newark, for example, how their "grand bargain" worked out.
Cunningham isn't down at the teacher level, but his argument runs parallel to Alter's: we'll shift more money into education, so long as we get to keep expanding segregating "choice" systems, and keep ranking teachers using innumerate test-based measures, and keep closing "failing" schools (even though that is itself a failed strategy -- and Cunningham, of all people, should know this).
But notice where Cunningham gets his money for this grand bargain: either the defense sector, or, as an outcome of a conversation "we should all welcome," the elderly. But there is no mention in Peter Cunningham's world (so far as I can find) of raising taxes on the wealthy to pay for better schools for children in economic disadvantage.
Thank goodness I'm not an old, crusty cynic. Because, if I were, I would point out thatEducation Post is funded by multi-billionaires Eli Broad, Michael Bloomberg, the Walton family, and an anonymous plutocrat -- the very people who have benefitted from ourhistorical income inequity and our historically low taxation rate on the wealthy.
Thank goodness.
What I'll instead focus on is this idea of "shifting a few percentage points" of the federal budget to education. Remember, Cunningham was a part of the Obama administration's first term; he was there back in 2009 when the fight to get stimulus money into the economy was being waged. In Cunningham's own words, President Obama was a champion of funneling more money into the schools:
See, there is common ground after all! Sure, us critics of "reform" may have a problems Jersey Jazzman: Education "Reform": The Wrong Conversation:First of all, this argument overlooks obvious areas of agreement among reformers and unions. For example, most reformers join teachers in supporting more funding.It’s worth remembering that the pro-reform Obama administration provided nearly $60 billion to save some 400,000 teaching jobs during the recession. This money came with no strings attached and dwarfed the administration’s “reform” initiatives. [emphasis mine]
