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Authors: Micah Uetricht
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are mandated to be principally concerned with measurable results and value-added assessments through test scores,and principals and entire school districts are judged based on their ability to raise test scores.
Teaching itself has become increasingly contingent work, a profession that chews up young educators and spits them out after a handful of years. Teachers are expected to take on additional administrative tasks, while at the same time their class sizes are growing and their planning periods are being whittled away. Teachers’ morale is at an all-time low, and teachers are leaving the profession in droves: A 2012 University of Pennsylvania study found that the largest group of teachers in public education had one year of experience. 5 The goal is to make life so unbearable for teachers that they are pushed out of the profession long before they come to expect middle-income salaries or provisions like tenure. Educating students can then be done on the cheap; the teacher with two decades of experience and a master’s degree can be replaced with a Teach for America volunteer putting in two years in a poverty-stricken elementary school in order to include it on his or her law school application.
Private foundations with massive resources have taken the lead in pushing this agenda under the guise of a concern for the well-being of America’s schoolchildren. Three in particular—the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, and the Walton Family Foundation—play a central role in shaping education reform policy. Unsurprisingly, these foundations, built on the largesse of three of the country’s wealthiest capitalists and their families,are pushing hard for free market reforms in public schools. That these foundations could accomplish this through strategic investments of a few billion dollars every year over the last decade or so in a sector whose cost comes to more than half a trillion dollars every year, with almost no accountability to the broader public, is fairly surprising—a testament to how desperately cash-strapped school districts around the country truly are. 6 Waving donations that are equivalent to a tiny percentage of most school districts’ annual budgets in front of superintendents staring down massive budget shortfalls seems to be all that is needed to convince administrators to adopt the free market agenda being peddled by these ultrawealthy philanthropists.
Besides making strategic donations directly to schools, these foundations have helped fund organizations that attempt to style themselves as leaders of a movement advocating for poor children of color in crumbling schools, positioning themselves as the children’s only advocates against cruel organized groups of grownups trying to rob them of an education. Their websites trumpet slogans like “Renewing Schools, Renewing Neighborhoods,” as that of Stand for Children (SfC) does; Democrats for Education Reform (DFER) say, in their statement of principles, that schools “have become captive to powerful, entrenched interests that too often put the demands of adults before the educational needs of children.” SfC and DFER, then, are the saviors for these students.
These organizations have effectively framed the issue as a battle between two groups: organizations like SfC, DFER, charter school advocates, and others who are pushing for reforms in the best interests of children on the one hand and, on the other, teachers unions, which are consistently throwing up roadblocks to students’ well-being in order to defend their own interests.
The goal of these foundations and the policies they have shepherded into the mainstream consensus is to bring education, as a sector, into line with the goals of capital accumulation. The humanistic goals of education—of creating informed citizens capable of creative and critical thinking—have been erased.
Pushback against these policies must include a willingness to confront
Teaching itself has become increasingly contingent work, a profession that chews up young educators and spits them out after a handful of years. Teachers are expected to take on additional administrative tasks, while at the same time their class sizes are growing and their planning periods are being whittled away. Teachers’ morale is at an all-time low, and teachers are leaving the profession in droves: A 2012 University of Pennsylvania study found that the largest group of teachers in public education had one year of experience. 5 The goal is to make life so unbearable for teachers that they are pushed out of the profession long before they come to expect middle-income salaries or provisions like tenure. Educating students can then be done on the cheap; the teacher with two decades of experience and a master’s degree can be replaced with a Teach for America volunteer putting in two years in a poverty-stricken elementary school in order to include it on his or her law school application.
Private foundations with massive resources have taken the lead in pushing this agenda under the guise of a concern for the well-being of America’s schoolchildren. Three in particular—the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, and the Walton Family Foundation—play a central role in shaping education reform policy. Unsurprisingly, these foundations, built on the largesse of three of the country’s wealthiest capitalists and their families,are pushing hard for free market reforms in public schools. That these foundations could accomplish this through strategic investments of a few billion dollars every year over the last decade or so in a sector whose cost comes to more than half a trillion dollars every year, with almost no accountability to the broader public, is fairly surprising—a testament to how desperately cash-strapped school districts around the country truly are. 6 Waving donations that are equivalent to a tiny percentage of most school districts’ annual budgets in front of superintendents staring down massive budget shortfalls seems to be all that is needed to convince administrators to adopt the free market agenda being peddled by these ultrawealthy philanthropists.
Besides making strategic donations directly to schools, these foundations have helped fund organizations that attempt to style themselves as leaders of a movement advocating for poor children of color in crumbling schools, positioning themselves as the children’s only advocates against cruel organized groups of grownups trying to rob them of an education. Their websites trumpet slogans like “Renewing Schools, Renewing Neighborhoods,” as that of Stand for Children (SfC) does; Democrats for Education Reform (DFER) say, in their statement of principles, that schools “have become captive to powerful, entrenched interests that too often put the demands of adults before the educational needs of children.” SfC and DFER, then, are the saviors for these students.
These organizations have effectively framed the issue as a battle between two groups: organizations like SfC, DFER, charter school advocates, and others who are pushing for reforms in the best interests of children on the one hand and, on the other, teachers unions, which are consistently throwing up roadblocks to students’ well-being in order to defend their own interests.
The goal of these foundations and the policies they have shepherded into the mainstream consensus is to bring education, as a sector, into line with the goals of capital accumulation. The humanistic goals of education—of creating informed citizens capable of creative and critical thinking—have been erased.
Pushback against these policies must include a willingness to confront
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