Education Rebranders
For the past ten years, there have been two ‘sides’ in the debate over how to best improve schools in this country.
On one side, you had people like Michelle Rhee, Jeb Bush, Bill Gates, Arne Duncan, Mike Bloomberg, and Rahm Emanuel. On the other side, you had people like Randi Weingarten, Diane Ravitch, Deborah Meier, and Leonie Haimson.
Both groups had ideas of how to best reform education. The first group favored things like charter schools, test based accountability for schools and teachers, and, for some of them, vouchers. The second group favored things like increased funding and reducing class size.
Though both groups wanted to reform, only the first group claimed the name ‘reformers.’ That first group also branded the other group with various negative monikers such as ‘status quo defenders.’ The ‘reformers’ were rich and organized and they came out with the movie ‘Waiting For Superman’ and they got Michelle Rhee on Oprah and there was really no way to take the name ‘reformer’ away from them, even though the other group wanted reform too, just of a different variety. Some rich hedge-funders started Democrats For Education Reform and suddenly people who knew absolutely nothing about education, like Whitney Tilson, were influencing politicians including former President Obama.
The ‘reformers’ had a pretty good run. From about 2008 until just recently ‘reformers’ had their way. With Race To The Top they got states to invent complicated, though supposedly objective, ways to measure teacher quality by analyzing standardized test scores. Bill Gates funded many studies to show that this was working. But after ten years, it became clear that the ‘reformers’ didn’t really know much about improving education and maybe they didn’t deserve to have the steering wheel anymore.
But people don’t give up power easily. So they changed their strategy. They ditched the Continue reading: Education Rebranders | Gary Rubinstein's Blog
