Market-Driven Rhetoric
I increasingly hear folks like Randi Weingarten and Diane Ravitch criticize America’s current experiments in education reform as “market-driven” or “corporate.” On some level, I understand what they mean. But on another level, it’s worth considering what kind of assumptions this language implies.
First of all, what makes a reform “market-driven”? Well, Weingarten and Ravitch are usually referring to the increasing use of student test-score growth to evaluate teachers; the dismissal of those teachers who are low-performing; and the opening up of more charter schools. And that’s fair on a superficial level. Education, like health care, does not lend itself to a free-market solution. And accountability and competition are indeed hallmarks of a free market.
But seriously now. Accountability and competition are more than just that. At their best, and that is a huge caveat, they are integral to how human beings function—which is why they exist at the heart of many institutions that we hold dear. Elections, for example, rely on accountability and competition. Does that make them bad? No. Does it make them vulnerable to gaming and in need of supervision? Yes.
Accountability and competition are also hallmarks of other things….like Sports, for example. Consider the evils of “corporate” high-school soccer and “market-driven” tee-ball. (In fact, it would be fun to see what would happen if you told a high-school football coach that he could not use touch downs to assess player performance—because, after all, the player cannot control the weather, the other team, the rest of his team, etc.)
More to the point, education, like health care, is not and never has been (and never will be) a free market. The use of this kind of rhetoric is calculated, but not remotely accurate.
For example, the vast majority of American teachers are not now (and never have been) subject to dismissal for a failure to improve student test scores. Even in DC, most teachers are still not evaluated based on test scores. They are evaluated by their principals and master educators. We do not consider that market-driven. (Although perhaps we should, since most private-sector employees are evaluated by their bosses as well.)
Charter schools do indeed inject more competition to the education system. But how many of our kids are actually in charter schools? About 5%, according to the Department of Education. More kids attend private schools.
So why all the anxiety about market-driven reforms? The fear is that these kinds of policies will eventually become common place. And it is true that charter schools and value-added evaluations are growing in practice every day. In 1999, only 2% of our kids attended charter schools.
But this kind of pre-emptive fear-mongering is not helping anyone. If we are to focus on what works in education—and stay very disciplined in looking for solutions—then we can’t rule out entire classes of ideas just because they have been effective in the private sector. After all, one thing this country still does better than any other is to generate productivity and innovation in large groups of people known as companies. These companies do a massive amount of research on basic human behavior: How do people work? What motivates them? How can we make employees happy? While it may feel good to reject this kind of knowledge, it is unwise.
What we need in this country is not market-based reforms or nonprofit-based reforms; what we are human-driven, evidence-based reforms.
Both sides of this debate have a tendency to latch on to policy agendas with very little regard for how real human beings actually function. And what we have found after decades of trying and failing is that no policy, no matter how well-intentioned, will work without considering the human beings who must implement it. Without measuring what actually works, what actually does not and listening to the teachers, parents, principals and most of all the students affected, we will just keep arguing in circles, with only the talking points changing.
Mary Porter (chemtchr) said on August 06, 2011 at 5:26 am
No, Amanda; you apparently don’t understand what Diane Ravitch means by “market driven reform”.
It isn’t a market where parents and teachers are shoppers. It is a market where education “services” can be sold to taxpayers at a profit, whether parents, children or communities want them or not.
The “reformers” postulate that only opportunities for increased profits on private investment can inspire innovation in education. They call it entrepreneurship, and it is supposed (by profit-seekinfg entrepreneurs)to be our nation’s highest moral value. This isn’t an aberrant conspiracy theory, it is the declared operating principle of the entire Obama Department of Education.
The premise is historic, and if you agree with it you should be willing to argue for it openly. If you are unaware of the whole question, you are now responsible for informing yourself, since you have taken it upon yourself to mischaracterize and dismiss the debate honest people are trying to raise. It isn’t a secret - the entrepreneurs hold conferences and give interviews to praise themselves and each other for their All-American profit seeking.
http://www.newschools.org/blog/tag/duncan
When Rupert Murdoch bought Wireless Generation, he spoke too openly of the $500 billion revenue stream in US public education that was waiting to be tapped by his ventures. Convicted junk-bond king Mike Milken founded K12inc, an interstate virtual school scam that sucks $7500 in tax revenue for every kid it can sign onto its rosters, in exchange for a box of school supplies and access to its junk web site’s wares. Gates has “partnered” with Pearson to market a national virtual curriculum, using his Core Standards dominate the “market” through regulatory capture. Those are the marketing questions Diane is concerned with.
SandrainBrevard said on August 06, 2011 at 8:06 am
There is little disagreement that NCLB failed. There is serious concerns regarding RT3 initiatives that go ignored and unanswered. I disagree that we are running around in circles. Until policymakers explain their rationale and cost benefit projections, the public must keep asking. Living and participating in a democracy is not easy. My questions are simple. My position is simple. I am a non-educator, member of a community, and a taxpayer. Who is accountable to me?
CarolineSF said on August 06, 2011 at 9:28 am
Correction for Mary P.—Michael Milken has had other involvement in profit-making education ventures, but it was “Bookie of Virtues” Bill Bennett (former Bush I ed czar, promoter of ethical purity until he was outed as a high-stakes compulsive gambler) who founded the parasitical K-12.
The so-called ed reformers have been openly promoting running schools like businesses for years. John Chubb and Terry Moe wrote “Politics, Markets and America’s Schools” in 1990 (make that decades) to push that very idea. Chubb then tried practicing what he preached by getting involved in for-profit Edison Schools, which was hailed by the reformers and the press as a miracle until it collapsed in total failure (at which point all its former cheerleaders pretended they had never heard of it, rather than acknowledging that maybe their concept was wrong). Moe was an enthusiastic supporter of Edison Schools.
The Cato Institute’s Andrew Coulson, an open supporter of a fully privatized education system (aka, abolishing public schools) wrote “Market Education” in 1999 to promote the same free-market concept.
For some reason, the current line among the reformy types is to act surprised and stung that anyone ever thought they were calling for running schools like businesses. This is an eye-roller to those of us who have followed their lies and hype for years. Sorry to see a formerly respectable journalist join in the “gosh, who ever said schools should be run like businesses?!” hypefest.
And, by the way, exactly which side is it that disdains, deprofessionalizes and attacks teachers, going well beyond simply refusing to give them a seat at the table? It’s disingenuous to say the least to act all wide-eyed and say both sides should listen to teachers.
Mary Porter (chemtchr) said on August 06, 2011 at 11:25 am
We’re both right, Caroline. Milken is credited as the founder of the commercial venture, along with Bennett.
Here’s a good recent run-down from business Week:
Education According to Mike Milken
With K12, the largest U.S. operator of taxpayer-funded online schools, the former junk-bond king has figured out how to make money in education. Is that a good thing?
By John Hechinger
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/11_24/b4232076996440.htm
CarolineSF said on August 06, 2011 at 1:32 pm
Oh, thanks, Mary—I had somehow missed that despite following K-12 (which is now infesting my community and neighboring communities, though getting little interest from parents as far as I can tell).
Tom Hoffman said on August 06, 2011 at 9:51 pm
Amanda,
You’re studying schools systems around the world, so you know that accountability and competition are part of all the successful examples to some degree. You are also quite aware that none of them—NONE—have become successful because of a strategy that sees the goal of the educational endeavor as the production of standarized test scores and statistics regarding graduation, college enrollment, etc.
This reductive view is makes this reform agenda inherently “corporate” and “market driven.” There has to be a bottom line, so the entire goal of education, the entire philosophy is being bent to fit a bottom line mentality.
Note as well however that in 2011 in the USA, many people, including the President, pay a lot of money to escape the “market driven reform” economy entirely. That is, they pay to send their children to schools which are not required to view their children as potential units of instructional output.
We all understand that for our own children—and most teachers come to understand the same for their students—that what we truly value goes far beyond a few test scores. Other successful countries know this. But we cannot have an efficient market without numbers, so we will build a system around those numbers.
Mary Porter (chemtchr) said on August 06, 2011 at 10:16 pm
Tom, what you say is true, as far as it goes. But you’re somehow assuming the market-driven players are vested in getting or using valid data, even to apply it to their limited vision. They aren’t.
They are profit-driven, competitive enterprises. “Data” is valuable only if it promotes their business plan. They are selling a mind-numbing array of useless “services” to unsuspecting taxpayers: consulting, monitoring, data tracking, systemic control and management, schoolwide learning programs, and finally, mountains of software and online access to junk workbook pages.
They have no products that can even raise scores on their own multiple choice tests. What Diane Ravitch is publicizing is their own data. The for-profit innovators and their non-profit faces are the orchestrators of system-wide cheating, push-out policies, data manipulation and outright lies.
I think they were sure they could game their own system and produce data to validate themselves; they can’t. Their services are too toxic to children.
Please Google the business pattern popularly called FUD. The data industry pioneered it, and it stands for “Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt.” Bill Gates is lionized as the FUDmaster because he outfudded IBM itself, to build his monopoly empire. Even if he believes his siezure of control of the public education revenue stream will ultimately be beneficial, the only expansion principle he knows is to cripple and undermine the competition.
The competition is the public education system, and he is wrong.
Tom Hoffman said on August 06, 2011 at 10:45 pm
Hi Mary,
My work involves free software, so I’m well acquainted with FUD.
And yes, my comment is a little narrow. In Providence the really corporate types are just getting warmed up, yet the “corporate reform model” has already reshaped education in their image.