Tag Archives: Education Reform

Anthony Cody, Gates Foundation in Ed Reform Debate

13 Thursday Sep 2012

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The below is my response to Irvin Scott and Stacey Childress’ (of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation) “Response to Anthony Cody: The Role of the Marketplace in Education.” Given their corporatist, technocratic stance on education reform, I guess I should stop applying for jobs with Gates, since I don’t think they do much in the way of good work in education.

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The use of MLK’s “Letter From Birmingham Jail” is self-serving and sanctimonious here at best, along with the idea that charter schools are public schools, as if the two are interchangeable. King’s letter wasn’t just about the growing impatience of African Americans on the long road to equality. It’s also about how to walk the road, the tools necessary to walk the road, as well as the urgency with which we should walk the road. In my dealings with the Gates Foundation over the years as a nonprofit manager for various projects and initiatives, speed has often been more valuable than getting it right. From the first funding of community-based computer labs in libraries (like Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh) to small schools collaborations with nonprofits and NYC DOE, moving from thought to finish was typically at warp factor five or higher. Even program officers I’ve met or known at Gates have admitted over the years that not every multi-million dollar expenditure for small schools, teacher effectiveness, or teacher evaluations has come with plenty of setbacks and mistakes, as well as inconclusive or minimally positive results.

To argue that charter schools are public schools is technically correct, but in practice, hardly so. Charter schools have their own boards, often do not draw their teachers from the same pool as traditional public schools, and many have selection criteria for students. Charter schools — particularly ones with higher levels of success — often have board members with deep pockets or are able to raise funds through those kinds of connections. They may have by-laws that enable them to hire non-union teachers, non-traditional teachers, even college instructors, in ways that traditional public schools simply cannot. And though the selection criteria for students varies from one charter school to the next, traditional public schools don’t have that option.

Yes, we need a twenty-first century education system in the US. But we’re not going to get there with more high-stakes standardized testing, with curriculum and teacher evaluations that are tied to test scores, with the funding of every half-baked idea that has its roots in the twentieth century. Real reform requires more than smart people entrusted with a portfolio of $5 or $10 million. It comes with real cooperation with educators, a commitment to engage parents, a curriculum that is about education beyond a test, a full-fledged effort at human development, not just job training. One thing that would be a place to start would be to focus on K-16 education, instead of separating the K-12 and post-secondary spheres, you know, to break free of our twentieth-century thinking about American education.

Irvin Scott and Stacey Childress should know all of this already. If they do not, shame on them for not doing the research and outreach that is a necessary part of grantmaking. However, since they do, it seems to me they need to do less defending of the Gates Foundation’s record and more work and real collaboration to move forward. “We don’t need no education” reform, so long as it continues to come out of elite money and thinking that dictates to the rest of us what reform will look like.

Chronicle of Higher Education – Shame On You!

03 Thursday May 2012

Posted by in 1, Academia, culture, Eclectic, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion

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Naomi Schaefer Riley, Chronicle of Higher Education blogger, September 25, 2011. (http://c-span.org). In public domain.

On April 30, Naomi Schaefer Riley, a blogger for The Chronicle of Higher Education’s Brainstorm digital platform, wrote the disrespectful and snarky/offensive post “The Most Persuasive Case for Eliminating Black Studies? Just Read the Dissertations.”

It was disrespectful, snarky and offensive because Riley used the post to go after Northwestern University graduate students who had literally just finished their doctoral theses. Not to mention the fact that Riley hadn’t actually read the dissertations she discussed in her post. For example, Riley called Ruth Hayes and her dissertation “‘So I Could Be Easeful’: Black Women’s Authoritative Knowledge on Childbirth” on the carpet. All because Hayes wrote that she “noticed that nonwhite women’s experiences were largely absent from natural-birth literature, which led me to look into historical black midwifery” in her abstract. “How could we overlook the nonwhite experience in ‘natural birth literature,’ whatever the heck that is?,” was Riley’s disrespectful and idiotic response. Riley based her response on a title and one sentence from a dissertation.

Riley wrote about two other dissertations, one about the origins of the subprime lending crisis for Blacks — going back to policies enacted by the federal government in the 1960s — the other about the history of Black Republicanism. She not only concluded based solely on the titles and a couple of statements that this was “a  collection of left-wing victimization claptrap.” Riley also decided the fate of Black Studies as a discipline, saying that these three doctoral thesis made the “case for eliminating the discipline,” at least in her snarky and offended mind.

If this was Riley’s one and only post, I’d simply accuse her of being an ill-informed ex-Wall Street Journal journalist who obviously has a limited understanding of the history of research in the humanities and social sciences fields of academia. One of marginalization and exclusion of the experiences of all Americans who aren’t White, male, rich and powerful. One in which remains the automatic assumption in many circles that any research done by Blacks on race, women on sexism, and gays and lesbians on homophobia is less valuable or unscholarly. I’ve known more than my share of colleagues who have experienced disdain, even occasional ostracism, because of their work, in the so-called liberal environment that is academia.

Riley, however, has posted multiple times about Blacks in academia blaming all of their ills on the “white man,” as she would put it. She’s complained about the validity of women’s studies and about the usefulness of so-called liberal research in her posts as well. It proves that Riley has as much understanding about research and academia as I do about embroidery. And I’ve at least had a couple of embroidery classes.

But Riley, for all of her snarky arrogance and willful ignorance — the very thing that defines her posts — isn’t the most significant culprit on this. The Chronicle of Higher Education is ultimately to blame. After years of writing the same turgid stories over and over again about the “two-body problem,” faculty compensation and university endowments, The Chronicle in the past year or so has attempted a turn toward the provocative. Instead of real attempts to reach out to educators, education reformers and other practitioners who aren’t tenured/tenure-track faculty and graduate students aspiring to such, they have settled on bringing in a group of bloggers whose sole job is to stir the pot.

There are big issues in higher education begging for coverage. The issue of the effectiveness of online higher education. The corruption that runs rampant at for-profit institutions and the public institutions that adopt for-profit practices. The over-reliance on data sets to determine higher education (as well as K-12) policies. The dominance of private foundations like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in determining how twenty-first century education reform will look — to the detriment of perhaps millions of children and college students.

No, these articles and discussions are rare in the world of The Chronicle. Instead, they had the wonderful idea of letting tenured faculty and inane journalists blog on issues that could possibly cause controversy, stir up discussions, even lead to an uptick in viewers of the Chronicle.com website. But The Chronicle isn’t Charlie Sheen or Kim Kardashian, where any publicity is good publicity. Especially when a journalist in the case of Riley didn’t do their due diligence before foaming at the mouth.

The most offensive thing about all of this is that The Chronicle, as the arrogant institution they are, will continue to allow the likes of Riley a platform, under the cloak of journalistic freedom. That is a shame, and a pitiful one at that.

Education Incorporated

13 Thursday Oct 2011

Posted by in 1, Academia, culture, Eclectic, Politics, race, Work, Youth

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Capitalist Education Factory, November 1, 2010. (Source/http://communiststudents.org.uk).

A generation ago, most of us in education worried about a federal government takeover of America’s 15,000 school districts with mandated standards. Wow, that prediction was way off, wasn’t it? (Oh, wait, the No Child Left Behind Act, passed in 2001, created a new era of national standards for accountability, not to mention high-stakes testing).

President George W. Bush signs into law the No Child Left Behind Act, Hamilton HS, Hamilton, Ohio, January 8, 2002. (http://www.whitehouse.gov). In public domain.

Now, we worry with good reason, as corporate interests inject themselves into education reform at every level. This has brought an imbalance to the education reform conversation that hasn’t existed since the days of Andrew Carnegie and the height of immigration of swarthy peoples from Southern and Eastern Europe. Now, as it was a century ago, it was the inclusion-vs.-exclusion debate. Whether to provide the best possible education for all comers, or sort and kick out as many “dull-minded” “undesirables” (both literally from 1911 to describe the learning disabled, immigrants and Black migrants) in K-12 schools as possible.

But this debate today — if we can really call it that — includes higher education. Of course, we know better than to call the millions of potential students who need some sort of post-high school training and education “morons” (also a 1911 term used by White psychologists who assumed anyone not WASP didn’t have the mental capacity to make use of a high school education). Yet we do attempt to sort these students and potential students into categories, like “adult learners,” “non-traditional students,” even “Edupunks,” a term

Anya Kamenetz, author of Edupunks Guide, at University of South Dakota, August 27, 2010. (http://www.usd.edu). In public domain.

coined by author Anya Kamenetz.

None of this has eliminated a common refrain in our field. That a four-year degree “isn’t for everyone,” as Kamenetz said to me after I asked her a tough question regarding the accessibility of her ideas for a Do-It-Yourself-university (DIYu) process of pursuing a college degree. It was a conference hosted by the Center for American Progress, but paid for by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Her idea, while helpful to 18-30 year-olds who are tech-savvy and with enough income to make this piecemeal education process work, was unhelpful to low-income students, and students of color over the age of thirty. And Kamenetz’s response was the typical exclusionary one.

Apparently, in our current economic climate, a full-time job isn’t for everyone either. Still, despite this reality, the Gates Foundation, Lumina Foundation for Education, and the Hewlett Foundation have all adopted similar models of thought around K-12 and higher education reform that have legitimized the work of people like Wendy Kopp and Michelle Rhee (Teach for America and The New Teacher Project, respectively) and institutions like University of Phoenix and Kaplan University. Models which draw heavily from corporate paradigms for success, including the punishment of failure. But they haven’t led millions of us to jobs in the new economy.

I recently attended a meeting hosted by the Brookings Institution’s Hamilton Project, in which authors presented a series of papers on K-12 education reform. Supposedly with cutting-edge ideas. Like one presented by MacArthur Foundation “genius” (emphasis on the quotation marks) Award winner Roland Fryer on providing student incentives linked to immediate and long-term educational goals for those most at risk of

Professor Roland Fryer, Harvard University Department of Economics, September 2011. (http://economics.harvard.edu).

dropping out of school, like low-income boys of color. Examples of paying fifth graders in Houston and New York $2 for every book they read or for completing their homework wasn’t so much cutting-edge as it was unremarkable. Incentives are fine, if you can pay for them or show how they nurture a passion for learning beyond the goal of completing individual tasks. This, of course, the “genius” couldn’t show.

The ridiculous assumption that Fryer made, arguing that because money in K-12 education had doubled since 1970, that funding wasn’t the issue, would’ve made me laugh as a high school senior. When you account for inflation, K-12 funding has declined, and not by a small amount, since the 1970s, and by the way, the millennial generation has created a new demand for schools, as the number of new schools or schools in need of renovations adds to this doubling in four decades. Fryer’s exclusion of data that a first-year graduate student wouldn’t have missed made me realize that most people in the field are so desperate for ideas that anything that sounds new must be good or cutting-edge. Especially if it’s funded by the Gates Foundation.

It’s not just the Gates Foundation, per se. It’s the idea that since things aren’t working for millions of students and undereducated workers, a model that concentrates on teacher effectiveness and treating students as customers — whether in fifth grade or in college — is the best way to go. This attitude has become so pervasive among well-funded education reformers that the idea of increasing funding for schools, or of making schools from pre-K on focus on all students in need of college/workforce readiness is about as welcome as Michael Moore at a Koch Brothers fundraiser.

Early college high schools and single-track, college-prep K-12 school districts, two of the great secrets of K-12 and higher education reform, remain such because these are difficult to bring to scale, and require more upfront investment than most philanthropists and businesses are willing to make. Not to mention, these represent the hard work of real reform, but ones that won’t make people like Kamenetz, Fryer, Kopp and Rhee stars. But by all means, let’s continue to fund every hair-brained idea as if tweaking our education system will yield results like a nuclear fusion plant on steroids.

Bad Conversations and Education Reform

02 Tuesday Nov 2010

Posted by in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Politics, race

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Improving Degree Completion for 21st Century Students, Center for American Progress, Washington, DC, November 2, 2010, Screen Shot. Donald Earl Collins

I’ve been thinking about the fields in which I’ve worked and sort-have-worked in over the past fourteen years, and I’ve drawn one simple conclusion. For all of the talk of education reform, the talk about reform itself is in need of a reformation. I’m tired of the contrast between the experts in the field — who pay little attention to the cutting-edge trends, research and activism in K-16 education — and the everyday folks. They refuse to do anything except complain about teachers, as if education is as simple as organizing a file cabinet.  The who, what and what for’s regarding education reform has stifled what should be an engaging conversation, one that’s essential in the consideration of America’s twenty-first century ills.

Who’s part of this conversation remains something of an atrocity. Almost all of the experts in education reform — whether on a scholarly panel or in the documentary Waiting for Superman — tend to be Whites (more male than female) over the age of fifty. With more than one in three students in public schools of color — and with tens of thousands of teachers and administrators of color in this school districts — it’s hard to believe that all the experts are White, and most of those are middle-aged to elderly males. Their vision, at best, is a liberalized twentieth-century vision of K-12 and postsecondary education. Most of their proposed solutions — smaller class sizes, more homework, small schools, higher certification standards — will not in any way fundamentally reform K-16 education.

When combined with what’s considered important in education reform these days, it becomes painfully

A Nation At Risk (1983) Book Cover, November 2, 2010. Donald Earl Collins

obvious that the conversations we have on education reform are predetermined ones based on certain interests and short-sighted economic considerations. Most of the money in education reform — whether from the federal government, private foundations or corporate interests — is earmarked for things related to STEM fields (science, technology, engineering and mathematics). No one living in this century would deny the importance of STEM fields to a post-industrial economy. But not to the exclusion of everything else. Science folk and scribes alike still need to know how to write well, to think critically, to act ethically, to extend themselves beyond government and corporate interests.

Thomas Friedman — at least as he wrote in The World Is Flat (2005) — Bill Gates, the Obama Administration are all correct in that STEM fields will provide living wages and supply jobs at a rate over the next generation to replace the easy jobs of the by-gone era of industrial jobs straight out of high school. Yet none of them fully appreciates the connection between education reform, community development, corporate irresponsibility, lobbyists and the swaying of government policies and the politics of race and class in all of this.

STEM fields without a real direction for providing livable communities for the poor and for low-income people of color. Education reform that doesn’t do more than make scientists out of artists. Ideas that don’t account for the long-term issues of climate change and energy and resource depletion. Education policies that contradict themselves in terms of funding and a lack of understanding of what education reform truly

Double the Numbers (2004) Book Cover, November 2, 2010. Donald Earl Collins

means. That’s what we have now, and have had since the 1940s.

In the end, all these ideas are about is tapping the same human resources. The dwindling middle class, folks who’ve managed a traditional education track, folks whose lives are stable enough to allow the resources necessary for higher and advanced education. This need to tweak — instead of overhaul — the educational status quo and then call it reform is what leads to bad conversations. This is why what little in the way of reform actually occurs, and why so few of our kids get the reform they truly deserve.