For the past ten years public education has been under assault by the self-proclaimed education ‘reformers.’ Strong personalities like Michelle Rhee, Joel Klein, Michael Bloomberg, Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, Corey Booker, and others led the movement that gave us Race To The Top, Race To The Top waivers, and the Every Child Succeeds Act.
They got a chance to experiment with their ideas subjecting kids and neighborhoods around the country to school closures, charter schools, and state test madness. After a few years they declared that their experiments were working, they pointed to a few schools that seemingly proved that if you replace unionized teachers who are not scared of being fired with non-unionized teachers who are scared of being fired, you will close the achievement gap measured by standardized test scores. But the successes were mostly false — charter schools were shedding 75% of their students in order to get a so-called 100% college acceptance rate. Other schools were practicing abusive discipline practices that forced out many of the most difficult to teach students. There was even a fiasco called the Tennessee Achievement School District which promised to take over schools in the bottom 5% and move them to the top 25% within five years. Ten years later exactly none of the schools made it out of the bottom 10%.
Reformers needed to change their PR strategy. They replaced Michelle Rhee with CONTINUE READING: Education Reinventers | Gary Rubinstein's Blog