More on Arne Duncan’s Legacy
In her new book about Newark, New Jersey and the school reform paid for by Facebook CEO-philanthropist Mark Zuckerberg, Dale Russakoff captures the language of what we can call “corporatized” school reform. Newark school reform was paid for by Zuckerberg’s $100 million grant, but the style couldn’t have happened without the movement promoted by Arne Duncan through I3 “innovation” money, School Improvement Grants and Race to the Top grants—a movement that has filled the public schools with consultants, many of them from the business schools and Eli Broad’s academy for superintendents, not from schools of education. (This blog also posted an earlier piece on Arne Duncan’s legacy.)
Here is how Russakoff describes Cami Anderson’s “corporate reform,” leadership training sessions for school principals: “‘Every good and high performing coach and CEO has a game plan—a lean, focused, clear plan,’ she said… As part of this process, she said, principals should articulate something she called a BHAG (‘Bee-hag’). When no one appeared familiar with the term, Anderson explained that it stood for a Big Hairy Audacious Goal. This, she said, was a clear and seemingly impossible objective around which everyone in a school could organize to achieve previously unthinkable progress. She credited the term to best-selling business author Jim Collins,whose many analyses of successful companies were treated as scripture across the school reform movement. Several staff members said they felt that the district had been overtaken by a cadre of technocrats, most of them white and commuting from New York, whose vocabulary was rich in education reform buzz-words. Besides ‘transformational’—never incremental—change, they also made it a priority to ‘move the needle,’ which meant to More on Arne Duncan’s Legacy | janresseger:
