After the Education Wars: Someone Needs to Save Us from Our Billionaire Saviors

After the Education Wars: Someone Needs to Save Us from Our Billionaire Saviors

After the Education Wars: Someone Needs to Save Us from Our Billionaire Saviors

After failing to prop-up Antonio Villaraigosa’s flagging gubernatorial campaign last June, Michael Bloomberg apparently spent the summer pondering whether it would be wiser for him to personally save the United States rather than waste his time trying to rescue California by proxy. Last week the New York Times reported that Bloomberg was mulling a run for the Presidency as a Democrat because that represented the most viable path to victory. As the Timesstory observed, while Bloomberg has engaged in some good work on guns and the environment, many of his other positions might not be very likely to win over the liberal base of the Democratic Party.

Interestingly, the New York Times piece listed Bloomberg’s more conservative views on criminal justice reform, #MeToo, and bank regulation, but was strangely silent on education, one of the central fronts where Bloomberg has spent millions of dollars promoting largely terrible ideas and candidates that have done far more harm than good to American public education.

As Andrea Gabor, (ironically) the Bloomberg chair of business journalism at Baruch College/CUNY, writes in her excellent new book After the Education Wars: How Smart Schools Upend the Business of Reform, Bloomberg’s reign in New York hardly represented a golden era for education: “to be an educator in Bloomberg’s New York was a little like being a Trotskyite in Bolshevik Russia—never fully trusted and ultimately sidelined.”

The corporate education reform crusade of the last several decades that folks like Bloomberg, Bill Gates, Eli Broad, and the Walton family have funded and nurtured is a top-down movement of billionaires guided by, Gabor astutely notes, an unquestioned gospel of neoliberal “truths”:

The business reformers came to the education table with their truths: a belief in market competition and quantitative measures. They came with their prejudices—favoring ideas and expertise forged in corporate boardrooms over knowledge and experience gleaned in Continue Reading: After the Education Wars: Someone Needs to Save Us from Our Billionaire Saviors

35 Years Adrift on an Ocean of Reforms - The Crucial Voice of the People

35 Years Adrift on an Ocean of Reforms - The Crucial Voice of the PeopleThe Crucial Voice of the People
35 Years Adrift on an Ocean of Reforms

A Nation at Risk began as a commissioned report to define problems in America’s schools. It became known more for the longstanding political debates that developed. But did this single report produce the ocean of reforms that now threaten to destroy our public schools? Was it the report that forced us to set our course on national standards and testing? Or did a few choice words, and powerful people, set us drifting on the ocean of reforms that are now eroding the educational foundation of America?

“The educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people.”

Like or loathe them, those words from A Nation at Risk live on in education reform infamy.

MormonWiki Secretary of Education Terrel Bell with President Reagan

As President Reagan explained, he and his Secretary of Education T. H. Bell “agreed that it was imperative to assemble a panel of America’s leading educators, an assembly of such eminence that the Nation would listen to its findings.” So when Continue reading:35 Years Adrift on an Ocean of Reforms - The Crucial Voice of the PeopleThe Crucial Voice of the People

‘It’s Like Amazon, But for Preschool’ (Audrey Watters) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

‘It’s Like Amazon, But for Preschool’ (Audrey Watters) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

‘It’s Like Amazon, But for Preschool’ (Audrey Watters)

Audrey Watters describes herself as “ … an education writer, an independent scholar, a serial dropout, a rabble-rouser, and ed-tech’s Cassandra.”

 

A year ago, the richest man in the world asked Twitter for suggestions on how he should most efficiently and charitably spend his wealth. And today, Jeff Bezos unveiled a few details about his plans – other than funding space travel, that is. His new philanthropic effort, The Day 1 Fund, will finance two initiatives: the Families Fund will work with existing organizations to address homelessness and hunger; and the Academies fund “will launch an operate a network of high-quality, full-scholarship, Montessori-inspired preschools in underserved communities.”

“We’ll use the same set of principles that have driven Amazon,” Bezos wrote in a note posted to Twitter. “Most important among these will be genuine intense customer obsession. The child will be the customer.”

The child will be the customer.

Bezos then went on to cite a phrase that is so often misquoted and misattributed in those shiny, happy motivational PowerPoint slides – you know the ones – that people like to post to social media: “Education is not the filling of a pail but the lighting of a fire.” W. B. Yeats never said this, for the record, but words get so easily twisted, history so easily co-opted.

The assurance that “the child will be the customer” underscores the belief – shared by many in and out of education reform and education technology – that education is simply a transaction: an individual’s decision-making in a “marketplace of ideas.” (There is no community, no public responsibility, no larger civic impulse for early childhood education here. It’s all about privateschools offering private, individual benefits.)

This idea that “the child will be the customer” is, of course, also a nod to Continue reading: ‘It’s Like Amazon, But for Preschool’ (Audrey Watters) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice