"Bill Gates, Eli Broad, the Waltons, and other rich theorists"

It's nice to read something about education reform written by someone who has actual experience as opposed to people who are simply rich and powerful.

By Marion Brady

Just about everybody who’s ever been to school has a theory about what’s wrong with education. And a good many of them have a theory about what would make what’s wrong right.

The list of those reform theories is long and getting longer: Get back to the basics! Lengthen the school day! Separate the sexes! Require more math and science! Toughen the standards! Add end-of-course exams! Increase the number of Advanced Placement courses! Put mayors in charge! Replace superintendents with retired military officers! Pay kids for good grades! Abolish teacher unions! End tenure! Lengthen the school year! Tie teacher pay to test scores! Adopt vouchers! Open more charter schools! Close colleges of education! Require school uniforms! Force parental cooperation! Give every kid a laptop! Fire the worst 25% of teachers, rank the rest, and publish the ranking in the newspaper! Adopt national standards for every school subject! Partner schools and businesses! Transfer authority from local school boards to the feds! (Just to begin a list.)

The school reform picture is chaotic, and I add to the chaos by advancing yet another theory (one almost nobody likes). I say the familiar “core curriculum” in use in America’s schools and colleges is a problem-plagued, dysfunctional,19th Century relic that fits the 21st Century about as well as the first Model T Ford fits into I-75 traffic.

An emergency national conference should be called to rethink it.

Currently, of course, the only reforms being taken seriously are those being pushed by Bill Gates, Eli Broad, the Waltons, and other rich theorists. [I bolded this because it is my favorite line]

Venture Philanthropy: Oxymoron? Updated

From The Broad Report:

VP [Venture Philanthropy] treats giving to public schooling as a “social investment” that like venture capital, must begin with a business plan, must involve quantitative measurement of efficacy, must be replicable to be “brought to scale”, and ideally will “leverage” public spending in ways compatible with the strategic donor. In the parlance of venture philanthropy grants are referred to as “investments”, donors are called “investors”, impact is renamed “social return”, evaluation becomes “performance measurement”, grant reviewing turns into “due diligence”, the grant list is renamed an “investment portfolio,” charter networks are referred to as “franchises” -- to name but some of the recasting of giving on investment. Within the view of venture philanthropy, donors are framed as both entrepreneurs and consumers while recipients are represented as investments.

Like PP says, this does not sound like eduspeak to me either.

Update: Here is the full PDF of Saltman's snippet above.

Delphi: Home To Broad And Gates

The Broad Foundation’s philanthropic interests extend well beyond art: health and education have been at the heart of what he calls his “venture philanthropy” model. He explains it to me: “We have three tests – one, if we don’t do it, will it happen anyway? Two, will it make a difference 20 or 30 years from now? And thirdly, the people we invest in, do they really have the ability to make it happen?

“I don’t worry about getting fired, nor does Bill Gates. So we’re going to take risks. Some things are not going to work out. And if they don’t work out, we move on.”

As Ken Libby said, Broad is not accountable, as his statement proves, because he can't get fired.  Of course his entire philosophy of school reform is to fire everyone, especially risk takers.  Bastard!

This is the guy [Eli Broad] who is funding the takeover of public education. With his billions and Gates' billions, he decides whether "it" will "happen anyway" and goes on to predict that "it" will be successful, or not in 30 years based on Broad's, what? A guess? A gut feeling?  Who is he, the Oracle at Delphi?

This guy has lots of money to play with. He really shouldn't be playing with an entire country's vulnerable, impoverished, needy, underfed, uninsured youth, should he?

Keep your greedy hands off public education.  It's not a fucking toy!