Let's talk about that market-based school reform, shall we?
How about every day this month?
In the past few weeks I've read over and over about "successful market-based reforms" and school districts "borrowing ideas from the world of business" as if this is some trendy, superexciting new model. As if it is not the shopworn, underwhelming methodology that unsuspecting communities have been force fed for the last ten, fifteen, even twenty years. As if it has not itself become the status quo.
So-called market-based school reform in education has been around for twenty years, and under the Obama administration it has been given free reign to gallop untrammeled throughout the land. But the glorious shining future of new and improved disrupted education hasn't arrived yet. Instead, parents and students responded to the Obama administration's mass assessment efforts with mass testing opt-outs; participant states in the PARCC (Common Core testing) Consortium have shrunk from 26 to 7; and spectacular corruption scandals have emerged across the country including mass cheating incidents and conflict of interest schemes. The disappointing latest NAEP scores--the first time they've ever dipped for American kids--have left the administration sputtering about how with such great advancements being implemented in our districts, we're bound to see initial setbacks.
So-called market reform is a model that's not new, and it bears little resemblance to anything in the actual world of business. But it is coming down upon us with the force of an avalanche, newly, again, still. There's one reason for this. It's not data. It's not evidence. It's not success. It's not pedagogy.
It's cash. That is to say, the profits generated by the privatizers and the dealers in educational technology.
While no one's really realized the $500 billion potential profits foreseen by Rupert Murdoch, there's an awful lot of scratch to be made in education.
What does this race to capture the $500 billion market share look like in Let's talk about that market-based school reform, shall we?: