The Corporatist School Agenda: Michelle Rhee’s Cause (11/3/14)

Sacramento’s power couple is Mayor Kevin Johnson and his wife Michelle Rhee. She was the “tiger mom” who ran the Washington D.C. schools for a while, then ran an organization called “Students First”... only to leave that job for Johnson’s controversial St. Hope academy. Ms. Rhee has been a lightning rod for controversy, particularly during her D.C. tenure which included lots of teacher firings, and claims of improvement that turn out to have been based on bogus  test results.

The “Corporatist School Agenda” Rhee has consistently promoted favors three tactics she asserts improve educational outcomes: 1. (union-busting) charter schools, 2. merit pay for teachers (because they’re so motivated by money), and 3. testing, testing, testing (to “measure” teacher effectiveness). The effect is to privatize schools without (technically) privatizing them while dis-empowering teachers.

Her squillionaire corporate backers for Students First include the likes of Eli Broad, a C-Suiter for home builder Kaufmann & Broad, and she was even the subject of a film funded by those same squillionaires--Waiting for Superman. The “Superman,” without any ironic reference to the Nazi übermensch, is the super teacher which the above incentives supposedly find, reward and retain, and who will ultimately improve our schools.

Waiting for Superman touts the Finnish schools as the ones to emulate, but pointedly omits mentioning that Finland pays its teachers well, fully funds its schools, and the teachers are unionized and tenured. Finnish schools are not the Jalopy Institutions™ we have in the U.S. where, after decades of under-funding and neglect, their failings have been all but inevitable.

But does science support any of Rhee’s tactics as producing better educational outcomes? The short answer is “no.” Actual science validates none of her preferred tactics as correlating with improved educational outcomes.

What does science say actually correlates with educational outcomes, then? One of the strongest correlations is with childhood poverty. In Finland childhood poverty affects two percent of the population. In the U.S. it’s 23%.

So all of the attacks on teachers promoted by Rhee and her cohorts are attacks with an agenda. They distract attention from the income inequality, and the squillionaire agenda of turning the public realm into a series of tollbooths whose tolls go to our rentier plutocrats.

(For those who doubt schools are under attack, read this about Philadelphia inner-city schools. Astonishing stuff.)

If our plutocrats can only privatize the school system, it would give them revenue--PBS just covered Andre Agassi’s new private equity fund that leases school buildings to charter schools--and weaken one of the last strong unions in the U.S. -- the teachers’ union. This is why you’ll hear / read particularly bitter attacks on teachers’ unions as the destroyer of schools, and as  unsympathetic to students (who should obviously be “first”).

To give you an idea of the depth and breadth of the plutocracy’s attacks on teachers, Students First actually supported a measure to end to defined benefit pensions for teachers in New York State. For those unfamiliar, defined benefit pensions are roughly twice as remunerative as defined contribution plans like 401Ks and IRAs. Teachers are among the last American workers to have these plans, which used to cover 70% of the workforce. (Read Ellen Schultz’s Retirement Heist book for the story of how America’s big corporations looted those well-funded pension plans to goose corporate profits and CEO compensation.)

Like Republicans, Democrats have pursued the attack on teachers too. For example: “[N.Y. Governor, Democrat Mario] Cuomo calls public schools a “monopoly” he wants to “bust up” in favor of “real performance measures with some competition, which is why [he likes] charter schools” [Daily News]. The real “performance measure” for charters is — ka-ching! –  looting and corruption, so Cuomo’s views are not surprising.” (from nakedcapitalism.com)

That’s not to say schooling doesn’t need to change. For one thing, it now deals with a brave new world of computers and alternative media. Marshall McLuhan used to say changes in media determined social movements--for example, the invention of moveable-type printing made Bibles available to the population (removing some priestly authority), and made learning to read more useful. By McLuhan’s lights, it also lead to that little social disruption we call the Reformation. No society has had to deal with a more “disruptive” technology than computers, so traditional schooling of necessity often lags behind needed skills. 

Nevertheless, shifting the emphasis of degree programs needn’t attack teachers. This environment of disruptive change certainly has nothing to do with their pensions. And we absolutely do not need to make our VISTA / Teach for America, the publicly subsidized teaching programs that provide of scabs in union disputes, or the cheap, enthusiastic labor charter schools could exploit.

What changes would work? We could emulate the unionized Finnish schools, or perhaps the Germans’ schools who educate students for something other than college. The Germans have technical internship programs that give high school graduates the skills to get jobs in a computerized economy. They also pay college students a salary to attend university.... and we could certainly address income / asset inequality. About that last bit: no need to take from the plutocrats. A regressive grant of income to the poor would work as well.

One final note about this school "reform" movement: It’s a natural outcome of what I’ll call the “MBA mentality.” Masters of Business Administration degrees are offered all over the country, but they originated with the “scientific management” theories of Frederick Winslow Taylor, a pioneering “efficiency expert.” One of Taylor’s foundational beliefs was that everything was measurable.

Oddly enough, many of Taylor’s experiments in measuring worker productivity (for example, loading pig iron onto boxcars) turn out to have been scams. He altered the results to fit his theories. This is no little scam, either, since his theories were one basis of the first business school in the nation (Wharton, at the University of Pennsylvania). Another scam artist whose experimental results were altered to fit his theories provided the intellectual foundation for Harvard’s business school.

This MBA mentality, which really amounts to magical thinking, wants to measure things that are inherently immeasurable, too. Trying to reduce teaching to a test score is roughly like trying to evaluate the humanity of workers based on their paycheck. For more about this, I recommend Matthew Stewart’s The Management Myth.

Unsurprisingly, given the background of MBA programs’ foundational scams, George W. Bush, the forty-third president, was the first MBA president.

So beware of the corporatist agenda guiding the (inevitable) revision of our schools. The Reagan administration already sought to de-fund any political education in high schools, and similar programs designed to deceive infest even our highest educational institutions. It’s no accident that conventional, neo-classical economics, to mention one degree program, entirely discounts banks and money as factors in the economy.

(For some footnotes see notwaitingforsuperman.org)